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D OWNP e ANDES 




In the Mottle Grande, the "Great Wilderness" of Bolivia, the commander of the first 

garrison insisted on sending a boy soldier, with an ancient and rusted Winchester, 

to "protect" me from the savages 



VAGABONDING 
DOWN THE ANDES 

BEING THE NARRATIVE OF 

A JOURNEY, CHIEFLY AFOOT, 

FROM PANAMA TO BUENOS 

AIRES 



BY *r 

HARRY A^FRANCK 

Author of "A Vagabond Journey Around the World," 

"Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala, and 

Honduras," "Four Months Afoot in 

Spain," "Zone Policeman 88," etc. 



ILLUSTRATED WITH 176 UNUSUAL 
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR, 
WITH A MAP SHOWING THE ROUTE 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1917 






Copyright, 1917, by 
The Century Co. 



Published September, 1917 




OCT 3 1917 



OcJ.A47.68Q4 






A FOREWORD OF WARNING 

A few years ago, when I began looking over the map of the world 
again, I chanced to have just been reading Prescott's " Conquest of 
Peru," and it was natural that my thoughts should turn to South 
America. My only plan, at the outset, was to follow, if possible, the 
old military highway of the Incas from Quito to Cuzco. Every trav- 
eler, however, knows the tendency of a journey to grow under one's 
feet. This one grew with such tropical luxuriance that before it 
ended I had spent, not eight months, but four full years, and had 
covered not merely the ancient Inca Empire, but all the ten republics 
and three colonies of South America. 

A considerable portion of this journey was made on foot. The 
reader may be moved to ask why. First of all, I formed the habit 
of walking early in life, developing an inability to depend on others 
in my movements. Then, too, the route lay through many regions in 
which no other animal than man can make his way for extended 
periods. Moreover, there was the question of caste. It is one of the 
drawbacks of South America that a white man cannot efface himself 
and be an unobserved observer, as on the highways of Europe. Social 
lines are so sharply drawn that he who would be received in frank 
equality by the peon, by the great mass of the population, must live 
and travel much as they do. Merely to ride a horse lifts him above the 
communality and sets a certain barrier, akin to race prejudice, between 
him and the foot-going hordes among whom my chief interest lay. 

At best these lines of caste are a drag on observant travel in South 
America. The " gringo " can never get completely out of his social 
stratum. His very color betrays him. It is always " Goot mawning, 
Meestear," too often with a silly, patronizing smile, from the " gente 
decente " class ; among the rest his mere appearance makes him as 
conspicuous as a white man among West Indians. Never can he be 
an inconspicuous part of the crowd, as in Europe. To get in touch 
with the " common people " requires actually living in their huts and 
tramping their roads. The dilettante method of approaching them, 
" slumming," will not do. The disadvantages of the primitive means 
of locomotion in wild regions, such as the Andes, are obvious. But 



A FOREWORD OF WARNING 

the advantages of walking over more ordinary methods of travel are 
no less decided. Though the means be more laborious, the mind is 
far sharper for facts and impressions while on foot than when loll- 
ing half asleep on a horse or in a train. The mere pleasure of look- 
ing forward to his arrival, subconsciously building up before his 
mind's eye a picture of his goal complete in every detail, not to men- 
tion that of looking back upon the journey from the comfort of his own 
armchair, is ample reward to any true victim of wanderlust. Thou- 
sands of men, supplied with all the comforts money can buy, roam the 
earth from top to bottom — and are supremely bored in the process. 
It is the struggle, the satisfaction of physical action, the accomplish- 
ment of something greatly desired and for a long time seemingly im- 
possible, that brings real pleasure, that makes every step forward a 
satisfaction, every little success in the advance an enjoyment. For 
after all, real travel is real labor. He who journeys only so far as he 
can without exertion, who shirks the difficulties, will know no more of 
the real joy of travel than he who lives without toil, seeking pleasure 
only and finding but the cold, dead body thereof, without ever realizing 
the joy of life itself. 

As in ancient times, so it is in the Andes to-day; distance cannot 
be covered without fatigue. On the other hand there is the com- 
pensation of knowing completely the country through which one 
passes, storing away in the mind a picture of each long-anticipated 
spot, indelible as long as life lasts. The Andean traveler will know 
the pleasures as well as the drawbacks of the journeys of earlier, 
more primitive days, the joy of evening hours, when suddenly, from 
the summit of the last toilsome ascent, he discovers, spread out in its 
smiling valley below, the peaceful village in which he is to take his 
night's repose, or when he perceives from afar, gilded by the rays 
of the setting sun, the towers of the famous city so long sought,—} 
hours of a vivid joy that few experiences can equal. 

Thanks again to the barriers of caste, he who would really know the 
masses of Latin America should not only live with them, but should 
dress as plainly as they do. It is hard at best to get into more than 
superficial contact with the South American Indian, and to some ex- 
tent his traits, like his blood, run through all classes. The upper- 
caste Latin American is by nature a masquerader ; he treats a " dis- 
tinguished stranger " as a real estate agent pilots a prospective buyer 
about the streets of some " New Berlin," cleverly sidestepping the 
drawbacks ; he shows his real self only when he is not on parade, be- 

vi 



A FOREWORD OF WARNING 

fore he learns that he is under observation, and claps on the mask he 
always has instantly at hand when he wishes to show " himself " ; 
and he rates every man's importance by the height of his collar and 
the color of his spats, cloaking himself in pretense accordingly. He 
who does not wish to know the truth about a Latin-American country 
should attire himself in a frock-coat, a silk hat, and appear with let- 
ters of introduction to the " people of importance." His hosts will 
take him in regal style along two or three of the best streets and into 
the show-places, will gild every garbage-can that is. likely to fall under 
his august eye, and will shield him from all the unpleasantnesses of 
life as carefully as the guardians of the princess in the fairy-tale. 
Hence the mere lack of ostentation, the mere appearance of being one 
of the negligible masses, goes far toward giving the unassigned wan- 
derer a vast advantage in getting at the unmasked truth, in avoid- 
ing false impressions, over men of more brilliant mind and better pow- 
ers of observation. 

My purpose in journeying through South America was primarily to 
study the ways of the common people. I am no more fond of the 
unsavory, either in physical contact or on the printed page, than are the 
rest of my fellow-countrymen. But every occupation has its draw- 
backs. No traveler through interior South America with whom I have 
yet spoken has found conditions better than herein indicated; though 
for some strange reason it appears to be the custom to shield readers 
from this, to tell intimate facts only privately and to falsify public 
utterances by glossing over all the crudities. The fact is that the man 
who has spent four years afield south of the Rio Grande, and has come 
back to tell the tale, can only shake with laughter when an exponent of 
the " germ theory " speaks. Explorers with millionaire fathers-in-law 
tell us that the out-of-the-way traveler to such a country should take 
with him numberless supplies, from sheets to after-dinner coffee. It 
is the best plan, for those whose aim is to live in comfort — or a still 
better plan is to remain at home. Far be it from me to censure 
the man who journeys southward for other purposes for taking with 
him all the comforts he can carry ; but he who seeks to know the people 
intimately must not merely tramp their trails; he must become, in 
so far as is possible, physically one of them. We should care little 
about the impressions of a European studying life in the United 
States who lived in his own tent and subsisted on canned goods he 
brought with him, however much we might admire his foresight. 

It may be argued that by following the plan I have outlined I saw 

vii 



A FOREWORD OF WARNING 

only the lower class and do not report conditions among the more 
fortunate inhabitants. Yet after all, the peon, the Indian, the masses, 
comprise nine tenths of the population of South America. There are 
fewer persons of pure European blood between our southern boundary 
and Cape Horn than in the state of New York ; and by no means all of 
these live in even comparative comfort. The well-dressed minority of 
Latin America has often had its spokesman; numerically, and on the 
whole, the condition of these is of as little importance in the general 
scheme of things as are the doings of our " Four Hundred " in the 
life of our hundred million. I have, therefore, summed up briefly 
the ways of this small, if conspicuous, class, and its ways are so 
monotonously alike throughout the length and breadth of Latin Amer- 
ica that this lumping together is not difficult. The chief problem in 
any country is the status of the great mass of population, the condi- 
tion of the common people, and it is to this that I have almost en- 
tirely confined myself in the ensuing pages. 

" Have you read 's book on Brazintine ? " a noted French 

traveler once asked me. " He says all the brazintinos are immoral 
and dishonest. You and I, who have been there, know this is true. 
But those are things one tells to a circle of friends, that one shares 
over a pipe at the club, mais, eniin, ga ne s'ecrit pas" ! 

It is due, I suppose, to a lack of Gallic finesse that I have never 
been able to grasp this point of view. Why the plain truth should be 
reserved for the fireside and personal friends, and should be kept from 
one's friends of the printed page, is beyond my fathoming. At any 
rate, I have made no attempt to follow that plan. I tried not to ex- 
pect everything in South America to be exactly as it is in the United 
States — I should, indeed, have considered that a misfortune. After 
all, I went south to see the Latin American as he is, not with the hope 
of finding him another American merely speaking another language. 
I have tried to judge him by his own ideals and history, fully aware 
that in the latter he did not have a " fair shake," rather than by our 
own. Yet the traveler cannot entirely lay aside his native point of 
view ; that would imply that he was not convinced of the wisdom of his 
own way of life, and the question would arise, Why not change? 
Neither the Latin-American nor the American point of view is all 
right or all wrong; they are simply different. Because we criticize 
does not necessarily mean that we claim superiority, though I am 
reminded of the American resident in South America who asserted that 
were he not convinced of his superiority to his neighbors, he would 

viii 



A FOREWORD OF WARNING 

forthwith tie a mill-stone about his neck and jump in where it was deep. 
But the traveler who does not express his own honest opinions, " loses," 
as the Brazilians say, " a splendid chance to keep silent." I have, 
therefore, set down my real, heartfelt impressions. These may be 
false, even worthless; the reader has full right to reject them in toto. 
But at least they have the virtue of frankness. 

Moreover, South America has had its fair share of apologists. 
Virtually every country publishes at intervals a luxurious volume of 
self-praise that resembles in its point of view the year-book of a 
high school or college class. Trade journals are constantly painting 
things South American in the rosiest of colors. It has been the tra- 
ditional policy of certain branches of our government to cultivate Latin- 
American friendship by a myopic disregard of all the shadows in the 
picture. In our own capital there exists a criminally optimistic so- 
ciety for the propagation of emasculated information concerning our 
neighbors to the south. Among " distinguished strangers " from our 
own land who have visited Latin America there seems to have been a 
conspiracy to whitewash everything, an agreement to have all they see 
or experience bathed, barbered, and manicured before permitting it to 
make its bow to our public. The enormous majority of descriptions 
of South America resemble the original about as much as a portrait 
resembles the sitter after a professional photographer has finished 
with it. 

I do not know what the Latin American may have been in other 
years — perhaps he was the splendid fellow many make him out. I 
am merely telling, as charitably as possible, how I found him. I am 
not interested in winning or losing his friendship, in selling him 
goods, or in gaining his " moral support " to our governmental activi- 
ties. I am interested only in giving as faithful a picture as possible 
of my experiences with him. There are good things, praiseworthy 
things in South America; if, in the telling, these have been over- 
shadowed by the less laudable, it is because the latter do so overshadow 
in point of fact. 

Obviously, the experiences of four years, even in Latin America, 
cannot be crowded within the covers of a volume or two. I have, 
therefore, confined myself within certain limits. History, for instance, 
has been almost completely eliminated. I have taken for granted in 
the reader a certain basic knowledge of South America, though in the 
case of many even well-educated Americans this seems to be taking 
much for granted. I have passed as briefly as possible over those 

ix 



A FOREWORD OF WARNING 

things which are already to be found within the walls of our libraries, 
confining myself so far as possible to that which I have personally 
seen or experienced. I have, however, dipped as freely into the litera- 
ture of each country as into the life itself, and in the few cases where 
I have made use of facts so acquired, I have not taken of my cramped 
space to acknowledge the debt in words. For similar reasons, though 
it may seem ingratitude, I have not taken the reader's time to thank 
individuals by name for personal kindnesses. They were many; but 
the doers know that their deeds were appreciated, without thanks 
being detailed here ; or if they do not, it is the fate of those who lend 
passing assistance to world-roamers to take their reward in inner satis- 
faction. 

The modern reader is prone to tire quickly of mere description ; but 
nature is so important a factor in the Andes that it cannot be briefly 
passed over. Personally I like an occasional sunset, like it so much 
that I sometimes go to the unrequited toil of attempting to paint 
one. The reader who prefers his stage bare, as in Shakespeare's day, 
can easily glide over those pages. If he does without stage-setting, 
however, and relies only on his imagination, his picture is apt to be 
false, for the imagination has very faulty materials from our school- 
books and the tales of wandering Miinchausens to work upon. Yet 
after all, even with all one's effort, it is sad how little of the splendid 
scenery, the atmosphere, the charm of it all — for in spite of its draw- 
backs, South America has charm — one can get down on paper. 

This was not a voyage of discovery ; or rather, if there was discov- 
ery, it was only of a different stratum of life, and not of new lands. 
My plan was not so much to find unexplored country in the ordinary 
sense, as to go by hitherto unmentioned paths through inhabited and 
known regions, the out-of-the-way corners of familiar cities and the 
undescribed gathering-places of mankind. In that sense South 
America is still chiefly " unexplored." 

Lastly, let me give fair warning that this is no tale of adventures. 
I would gladly have had it otherwise. I sought eagerly for experi- 
ences that would make the story more worth the telling; I tried my 
sincerest to get into trouble ; all in vain. In Mexico I marched peace- 
fully about between two falling empires. In Guatemala I strolled non- 
chalantly among Estrada Cabrara's band of hired assassins. In Hon- 
duras I chatted with the leaders of the latest revolution. In Colombia 
I met many cripples of the civil war but recently ended. In Ecuador 
I found only peace and apathy in the very streets through which an ex- 



A FOREWORD OF WARNING 

president and his henchman had been dragged to death a few months 
before. In Peru all was love and brotherhood — until after I left. 
In the Bolivian Chaco wild Indians wiped out a company of soldiers 
not a hundred miles from where I was passing in placid unconcern. 
In the Paraguayan capital I sat with the man who not a year before 
had captained a particularly bloody coup d'etat. In Brazil I passed 
through two sections virtually in anarchy, and in one of its state capi- 
tals watched a riot that came perilously near being a revolution. In 
Venezuela I strolled serenely through the very ranks of revolters mere 
days before the leader and many of his band were killed. Yet hardly 
once did I knowingly come near personal violence. The fact is that 
South America is atrociously safe. Dangers are mostly those of popu- 
lar novelists, from the pages of travelers who succumb to the natural 
temptation to " draw the long bow," after the fashion of Marco Polo. 

It may be that there was a better way to have told this story than as 
a day-to-day narrative. But even at that, it could not honestly have 
escaped a certain monotony; for monotony is ingrained in the fiber 
of South America. Not to have reported the journey chronologically 
would have made for succinctness, but at the expense, perhaps, of 
truth. It may be wearisome to hear of virtually every night's stop- 
ping-place; yet as the traveler through the interior must stop at al- 
most every hut along the way, the sum total of these is a description 
of the whole country. If the story appears sketchy and piecemeal, it 
is because I have denied myself, erroneously perhaps, even the Bar- 
rovian privilege of transposing or inventing enough to make a smoother 
and more interesting story. A book of travel cannot have something 
always happening; that is the privilege of fiction. The novelist can 
forge his materials to his liking ; the travel-writer is very limited, even 
in opportunity to amalgamate, his material being very hard and non- 
plastic. Even to transpose and combine incidents is often to falsify, 
for what is true in one spot may never have been so a hundred miles 
further on. 

The necessity of suddenly abandoning this task for other and more 
important duties has made it impossible to give it final polish, to 
eliminate much that should have been eliminated, and to improve 
much of what remains. 

Harry A. Franck. 

Plattsburg, New York, August I, 1917. 



XI 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Up to Bogota .,....' 3 

II The Cloistered City . . . 22 

III From Bogota Over the Quindio 39 

IV Along the Cauca Valley 63 

V Down the Andes to Quito 85 

VI The City of the Equator 127 

VII Down Volcano Avenue 167 

VIII Through Southern Ecuador 190 

IX The Wilds of Northern Peru 209 

X Approaching Inca Land 244 

XI Drawbacks of the Trail 270 

XII The Roof of Peru 300 

XIII Round About the Peruvian Capital 324 

XIV Overland Toward Cuzco 342 

XV The Route of the Conquistadores 392 

XVI The City of the Sun 405 

XVII A Forgotten City of the Andes 454 

XVIII The Collasuyu, or " Upper " Peru 480 

XIX On Foot Across Tropical Bolivia 517 

XX Life in the Bolivian Wilderness 543 

XXI Skirting the Gran Chaco 573 

XXII Southward Through Guarani Land 600 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING 
PAGE 



In the Monte Grande, the "Great Wilderness" of Bolivia, the commander of 
the garrison insisted on sending a boy soldier, with an ancient and rusted 
Winchester, to "protect" me from the savages Frontispiece 

One of the wood-burning steamers of the lower Magdalena, on the route to 
Bogota ........... 

Along the Magdalena we halted several times each day for fuel 

Hays catches his first glimpse of the jungles of Colombia 

The stewards of the ' ' Alicia ' ' in full uniform ...... 

A village on the banks of the Magdalena . .... 

Jiradot ; end of the steamer line and beginning of the railroad to Bogota . 

A typical Indian hut on the outskirts of Bogota ..... 

Indian girls and women are the chief dray-horses of the Colombian capital 

Bogota and its sabana from the summit of Guadalupe 

The central plaza of Bogota from the window of our room . 

A chola, or half- Indian girl, of Bogota backed by an outcast of the "gent 
decente " class .......... 

A street of Bogota. The line of flaggings in the center is for the use of 
Indians and four-footed burden bearers ..... 



Celebrating Colombia's Independence Day (July 20th) 

Meanwhile in another square the populace marvels at the feats of "maroma 
nacional " of an amateur circus ....... 

A section of the ancient highway, built by the Spaniards more than three 
centuries ago .......... 

Fellow-travelers at the edge of the sabana of Bogota .... 

Approaching the Central Cordillera of the Andes . . 

Hays, seated before the "Hotel Mi Casa" and behind one of his $5 cigars 

A bit of the road by which we mounted to the Quindio pass over the central 
range, with forests of the slender palms peculiar to the region . 

The first days on the road ; showing how I would have traveled by choice . 

On the western side of the Central Cordillera the trail drops quickly down into 
the tropics again ......... 

XV 



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ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING 
PAGE 



Like those of the days of Shakespeare, the theater of Cartago consists of a 
stage — of split bamboo, with a tile roof — inside the patio of the ' ' hotel " 

Cartago watching our departure . . . 

Along the Cauca Valley ......... 

In places the Cauca Valley swarmed with locusts .... 

Worse than the locusts ......... 

The market-place of Tulua, with the cross that protects it against all sorts of 
calamities. .......... 

A view of the "sacred city" of Buga, with the new church erected in honor of 
the miraculous Virgin . 

A horseman of the Cauca in full regalia ...... 

The scene of "Maria," most famous of South American novels, and once the 
residence of its author ........ 



The home of "Maria"; and a typical hacendado family of the Cauca 

The market-place of Cajibio, in the highlands of Popayan . 

Crossing the Cauca River with a pack train by one of the typical "ferries" of 
the Andes .......... 

A village of the mountainous region south of Popayan ... 

Hays, less considerable weight, and a fellow-roadster .... 

An Indian woman weaving teque-teque or native cloth, by the same method used 
before the Conquest . . . 

Quito lies in a pocket of the Andes, at the foot of Pichincha, more than 10,000 
feet above sea-level ......... 

A view of Quito, backed by the Panecillo that bottles it up on the south 

A patio of the Monastery of San Francisco, one of the eighteen monasteries 
and convents of Quito, said to be the most extensive in the Western 
Hemisphere ........... 

The family of " Don Panchito " with whom I lived in Quito . 

Girls of the "gente decente" class of Quito, in a school run by European nuns 

Quito does not put its faith in small locks and keys ..... 

Ecuadorian soldiers before the national " palace " ..... 

A corner of Quito — looking through a garbage-hole into one of the many ravines 
by which the city is broken up ........ 

After the bullfight a yearling is often turned into the ring for the amusement 
of the youthful male population of Quito ...... 

A group of the Indians that form so large a percentage of Quito's population 

The undertaker's delivery wagon ........ 

XVI 



64 
64 
69 
69 
72 

72V 

76^ 
76 v 

80 • 
80 I 

96 

101 " 

101 v 

108 » 

108 

120 
129 



129 
i33 
133 

140 v 

140 

144 

149 
149 

156 *' 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Probably not his own in spite of the circumstantial evidence against him . 

Almost everything that moves in Quito rides on the backs of Indians . 

An Indian family driving away dull care — and watching me take the picture of 
a dog down the street ......... 

The street by which one leaves Quito on the tramp to the south . 

Long before Edison thought of his poured-cement houses, the Indians of the 
Andes were building their fences in a similar manner . . 

Typical huts of the paramo of Tiopullo ....... 

Beyond the paramo of Azuay the trail clambers over broken rock ledges into the 
town of Cafiar . . . . . . . . . 

Indians carrying a grand piano across the plaza of Cafiar on a journey to the 
interior ............ 

The Indians of Ecuador draw their droves of cattle on after them by playing 
a weird, mournful ' ' music ' ' on the bocina, made of a section of bamboo 



ACING 
PAGE 



56 

61 s 



61 y 

e 5 y 



65^ 
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68 v 
7*S 



72 y 

76 

76/ 



81 s 

84 s 

84^ 

88" 
88* 
93 



Ruins of the fortress of Ingapirca, near Cafiar ...... 

A mild example of the "road" through southern Ecuador .... 

Cuenca, third city of Ecuador, lies in one of the most fertile and beautiful 
valleys of the Andes .......... 

A detail of the "Panama" hat market of the Azogues . ... 

Arrived at the wholesale establishments of Cuenca, the hats are finished . 

My home in Cuenca, with the Montesinos family ..... 

Students of the Colegio of Cuenca ........ 

The " English Language Club " of Cuenca in full session .... 

An hacienda-house of southern Ecuador, backed by its grove of eucalyptus- 
trees. .......... . 193 v'' 

Plowing for wheat or corn on the hacienda of Cumbe ..... 200 ^ 

The church, and the dwelling of my host, the priest of Ofia .... 208 S" 

Loja, southernmost city of Ecuador, backed by her endless labyrinth of moun- 
tains . . 208 ^ 

The guinea-pigs on which I feasted upon breaking out of the wilderness on the 

Peruvian frontier — and the cook . . . . . . . . 213 \f 

The Indians of Zaraguro are different, both in type and costume, from the 

meeker types of Quito and vicinity . . . . . . .213 

In the semi-tropical Province of Jaen, in north Peru, sugarcane grows luxuriantly 220 
The sugar that is not turned into aguardiente, or native whiskey, is boiled down 
in the trapiche into crude brown blocks, variously known as panela, 
chancaca, rapadura, empanisado, papelon, etc., weighed and wrapped in 
banana-leaves, selling at about 5 cents for 3 pounds .... 220 ' 

xvii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING 
PAGE 



The teniente-gobernador, or "lieutenant-governor, " of Jaen .... 229 / 

The two of us . . . . . . . . . . . 229 

The main street of the great provincial capital of Jaen .... 236 

The government " ferry " across the Huancabamba ..... 236 

A woman of the jungles of Jaen preparing me the first meal in days at the 

typical Ecuadorian cook-stove ........ 248 

Peruvian prisoners earn their own livelihood by weaving hats, spinning yarn, 

and the like ........... 248 

The ancient city of Cajamarca lies in one of the most magnificent highland 

valleys of the Andes .......... 257 * 

The only wheeled vehicle I saw in Peru during my first three months in that 

country ............ 264. 

One of the many unfinished churches of Cajamarca . . . . .264 

One of the few remaining simpichacas, or suspension bridges, of the Andes . . 272 v 

A typical shop of the Andes . . . . . . . . .272 

Detail of the ruins of " Marca-Huamachuco, " high up on the mountain above 

the modern town of that name ........ 289. 

Pallasca, to which I climbed from one of the mightiest quebradas in the Andes . 2 89 

Gatalino Aguilar and his wife, Fermin Alva, my nurses in the hospital of Caraz . 296 

An Indian of Cerro de Pasco region carrying a slaughtered sheep . . . 296 

Though within a few degrees of the equator, Huar&z, capital of the most 
populous department of Peru, has a veritable Swiss netting of snow-clad 

peaks and glaciers .......... 304 

Threshing wheat with the aid of the wind ....... 304 

Crossing the Central Cordillera of the Andes south of Huar&z, barely nine 

degrees below the equator . . . . . . . . . 308 

The fortress of the former Inca city of Huanaco el Viejo . . . .317 

A typical residence of the Indians of the high pdramos . . . . .317 

The arrieros with whom I left Huallanga, and the family inhabiting the hut 

shown in the preceding picture . . . . . . . .321 

The immaculate staff of the Cerro de Pasco hospital . . . . . . 32 1 

The semi-weekly lottery drawing in the main plaza of Lima . . . 3 2 ^ 

All aboard! A Sunday excursion that was not posed . . . . 328 

The bleak mining town of Morococha, more than 16,000 feet above sea-level 336 

The American miners of Morococha live in comfort for all the altitude and 

bleakness of their surroundings ........ 33^ 

A typical miner of the high Peruvian Andes ...... 34° 

xviii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Miners of Morococha, — a Welch foreman and two of his gang 

A hint of what the second-class traveler on Peruvian railways must put up 
with ...... ... 

The wide main street and a part of the immense market of Huancayo, said to 
be the largest in Peru . . . . 

A detail of the market of Huancayo, with a bit of pottery like that of the day 
ofthelncas .......... 

"Chusquito" descending one of the few remnants of the old Inca highway '. 
found from Quito to Cuzco ....... 

Huancavelica, one of the most picturesque and least-visited provincial capitals 
of Peru ........... 

On the "road" to Ayacucho I overtook a lawyer who was importing a piano 

Carrying the piano across one of the typical bridges of the Peruvian Andes 

The striking headdress of the women of Ayacucho .... 

The friendly and ingratiating waiters of our hotel in Ayacucho 

A religious procession in the main square of Ayacucho 

A gala Sunday in the improvised "bullring" of Ayacucho . 

A familiar sight in the Andes — a recently butchered beef hung in sheets along 
the clothes-line to sun-dry into charqui ..... 

A typical "bed" in the guest-room provided for travelers by many Peruvian 
hacendados . . 

The fatherless urchin who fell in with me beyond Andahuaylas 

My body-servant in Andahuaylas, and the sickle with which he was supposed to 
cut all the alfalfa " Chusquito " could eat ..... 

A view of Quito, capital of Ecuador, from the summit of the Panecillo . 
View of Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital, from the summit of Sacsahuaman 
Building a house in Peru 
The patio of the "Hotel Progreso" of Abancay ..... 

A religious procession in Abancay . . . . . . . 

A chola of Abancay, wearing the dicalla which all put on at the age of puberty 
A chiefly-Indian woman of Abancay ....... 

The first view of Cuzco ......... 

An Indian of Cuzco, speaking only Quichua ..... 

Indian women of the market-place, wearing the "pancake" hat of Cuzco 
An Indian required to pay for the day's mass proudly clings to his staff of office 
Youth from a- village near Cuzco, each with a coca cud in his cheek 

xix 



FACING 
PAGE 



340 
349 

349 

356 

356 

365 
376 
376 
385 
385 
392 
392 

400 

400 
405 

405 
408 
408 
412 
412 
417 
432 
432 
437 
444 
444 
449 
449 



s 



s 



s 



s 



S 



y 






j 



1 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING 
PAGE 



Our party setting out for Machu Picchu across the high plains about Cuzco 

Ollantaybambo, the end of the first day's journey, in the valley of the Uru 
bamba ........... 

Spring plowing in the Urubamba valley ...... 

As we rode eastward into the sunrise down the gorge of the Urubamba 
glacier-clad Piri above threw off its night wraps of clouds 

The semicircular tower and some of the finest stone-cutting and fitting of 
Machu Picchu .......... 

We came out on the edge of things and Machu Picchu lay before us 

The resounding gorge of the Urubamba, with terraces of the ancient inhabitants 
on the inaccessible left bank ....... 

One of the many stairways of Machu Picchu . . . 

The temple of the three windows, an unusual feature of Inca architecture . 

" Ruminaui " seated on the intihuatana, or sun-dial, at the top of the town 

The babies of Bolivia sit in a whole nest of finery on nurse's back . 

Arequipa is built of stones light as wood, cut from a neighboring quarry . 

Indians plowing on the shores of Titicaca ...... 

Sunrise at Copacabana, the sacred city of Bolivia on the shores of Titicaca 

One of the two huge figures facing the grass-grown plaza of modern Tiahuanaco 
at the entrance to the church ....... 

The ancient god of Tiahuanaco before which the Indian woman, herding her 
pigs, bowed down in worship ....... 

Arequipa, second city of Peru, in its desert oasis, backed by misty volcano 

" Suddenly the bleak pampa falls away at one's feet" ... 

Llamas of La Paz patiently awaiting the return of their driver 

Down the valley below La 'Paz the pink and yellow soil stands in fantastic 
rain-gashed cliff s ......... 

Cholas of La Paz, in their native garb . . . 

"Sandy" leading his train of carts loaded with construction material for the 
railroad to Cochabamba ........ 

The "gringo bench" of Cochabamba, — left to right, "Old Man Simpson' 
Tommy Cox; Sampson, the Cockney; Owen; and Scribmer 

The home and family of the alcalde who could not read 

Our impromptu celebration of Christmas Eve in Pampa Grande . 

A street of Santa Cruz de la Sierra after a shower .... 

Conscripts of the Bolivian army practicing their first maneuvers in the central 
plaza of Santa Cruz . . . . . . . . 



/ 



XX 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING 

PAGE y 

Manuel Abasto, a native of Santa Cruz de la Sierra ..... 552 v 

Through the open doors of Santa Cruz one often catches a glimpse of the patio, 

a garden gay with flowers ........ 5152 

y 

Konanz seated on our baggage in the pelota de cuero ..... 560 

The force of one of the four for tines, or "fortresses, " with which the Bolivian y 

government garrisons the Monte Grande against the savages . . . 560 

Jim and "Hughtie" Powell, Americans from Texas who have turned Bolivian >> 

peons 564 

A jungle hair-cut ........... 564 S 

The old stone and brick church and monastery of San Jose" .... 573 y 

The fatherly old cura of San Jose standing before the Jesuit sun-dial . . 573*^ 

Henry Halsey, the American rancher, of tropical Bolivia, and his family . 577 %/ 

Saddle-steers take the place of horses and mules in the muddy parts of tropical 

Bolivia ............ 577^" 

A German of tropical Bolivia and his " housekeeper" ..... 581 S 

Santiago de Chiquitos, above the gnat-line, backed by its reddish cliffs . . 581 * 

"Don Cupertino," chief adornment of eastern Bolivia, with his family and 

dependents ........... 589 * 

The tipoy, a single loose gown, constitutes the entire garb of most of the native 

women of tropical Bolivia ......... 593*' 

A girl of Santiago de Chiquitos selling a chicken to the cook of ' ' los americanos" 593 S 

The shoemaker who lived next door to "los americanos " in Santiago de Chiqui- 
tos, and his latest " wife " ......... 597^ 

A birthday dance in Santiago de Chiquitos, in honor of the German in the center 

background ........... 597 v 

A view from the promenade-deck of the steamer ... . . . 604 v 

A Paraguayan landscape, with native cart ....... 604 S* 

The mixture of types in the Argentine ....... 608 '^ 

MAP 
The author's itinerary . . . . . . . . . 40 * 



XXI 



VAGABONDING 
DOWN THE ANDES 



VAGABONDING 
DOWN THE ANDES 



CHAPTER I 

UP TO BOGOTA 

WHEN we had " made a stake " as Canal Zone policemen, Leo 
Hays and I sailed from Panama to South America. On 
board the Royal Mail steamer the waist of the ship, to 
which our tickets confined us, was a screaming pandemonium of West 
Indian negroes, homeward bound from canal digging, and a veritable 
chaos of their baggage and household goods — and gods. — ranging 
from tin trunks to pet monkeys, from battered phonographs to plush- 
bound Bibles. We preempted deck space for our suitcases and sat 
down upon them. It chanced to be the same day on which, eight 
years before, I had set out on a " vagabond journey " around the 
world. 

Twenty- four hours after our last Zone handshake we marched down 
the gangplank among the little brown policemen of" Cartagena, Co- 
lombia, and fought our way through a mob of dock loafers to the toy 
railroad train that eventually creaked away into the city. Our re- 
volvers and cartridge belts we wore out of sight ; uniforms and night- 
sticks no longer figured in our equipment. But the campaign costume 
we had chosen, — broad felt hats, Norfolk jackets and breeches of olive 
drab, and the leather leggings common to the Zone — were evidently 
more conspicuous here than we had suspected. For about us wher- 
ever we moved sounded awe-struck stage whispers : 

" Psst ! Policia de la Zona ! " 

The ancient city and fortress of Cartagena — and for America it is 
old indeed — squats on a sandy point jutting far out into the blue 
Caribbean, with a beach curving inland on either hand. A sea-wall be- 
side which that of Panama seems a plaything, of massive weather- 
tarnished, ocean-lashed stones, brown-gray with age, with stern, dig- 

3 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

nified old gateways, encloses the city in irregular form. On its top 
is a promenade varying in width from a carriage drive to a manceuver 
field. Outside, down on the languidly garrulous beach, little thatched 
huts have drifted together under the cocoanut groves. Inside, the 
dust-deep streets have long since lost most of the cobbled paving of 
their Spanish birthright; the narrow, inadequate tile sidewalks are 
far from continuous, and the rules of life are so lax that only the con- 
stant sweep of the sea air accounts for old age amid conditions that 
should bring death early and often. 

Long before we reached our hotel we regretted our penuriousness in 
scorning cabs and carriers. Not only did the weight of our suitcases 
double every few yards in the leaden tropical air, and the labyrinthian 
way through the city elude us at every turn, but at least a score of 
ragged boys trailed respectfully but hopefully in our rear with the 
anticipatory manner of an opera understudy waiting in the edge of the 
wings for the principal to break down at the next note. A generous 
percentage of the population crowded the doorways and children raced 
ahead to summon forth their families to behold what was apparently 
the most exciting thing that had taken place in Cartagena in months. 
Evidently a caballero bearing his own material burdens was a strange 
sight in South America. The populace stared fixedly, in as impersonal 
a way as ruminating oxen, and every few yards half-naked children, 
evidently abetted by their elders, swarmed out upon us with shrill 
cries of " Wan sheeling ! " 

We were soon reminded that we had left behind our power as well 
as our emoluments. The proprietress whose oily Hebrew smile greeted 
us at the hotel door was none other than one long " wanted " on the 
Zone on the charge of running a disorderly house. The room she as- 
signed us was enormous, but the furnishings were scant and thin, the 
beds mere strips of canvas, as befits a country of perennial midsummer. 
While we unpacked and shaved, a ragged brown urchin slipped in with 
the Barranquilla newspaper. In a characteristic burst of generosity 
Hays tossed him double the price demanded — only to discover just 
after the vendor was out of reach that the pauperous little sheet was 
twenty days old. It was a " bunco game " so aged it had grown new 
again. Maria, the chambermaid, already in the sear and yellow leaf, 
shuffled in frequently, supremely indifferent to our scantiness of attire. 
Now and then several younger females of decidedly African ancestry 
strolled by as nonchalantly, one by one, to inquire whether we had any 
soiled clothes to wash, and loitered about in a manner to suggest that 

4 




One of the wood-burning steamers of the lower Magdalena, on the route to Bogota 




Along the Magdalena we halted several times each day for fuel, the villagers looking idly 
on while the crew carried many a woodpile on board across a precarious gang-plank - 



UP TO BOGOTA 

the question was meant to be taken figuratively. This friendliness was 
the general attitude of all the town. Outwardly at least we were shown 
no discourtesy, and there was little confirmation of the reputed hatred 
of Americans. Yet almost from the moment of our landing we noted 
that Colombians seemed to avoid speaking to us beyond the require- 
ments of business or the cut and dried forms of their habitual polite- 
ness. Still, with only an anemic candle to flicker its pale shadows 
on the enclosing wall of the droning tropical night, we settled down to 
the conclusion' that Colombia, alleged the deadly enemy of all things 
American and " heretical," was less black than she <had been painted. 

We had reached the land of easy money. Merely to step into a bank 
with a $5 bill was to emerge with a bulging roll of $500. We could 
not repress a millionaire swagger when we tossed a hundred-dollar 
note on the counter to pay for a pair of socks, though it quickly wilted 
when a few nickel pieces were tendered in change. Hays dropped into 
a dingy little hole-in-the-wall to buy a cigar, but though it was cer- 
tainly the only $5 cigar he had ever strutted behind, he soon tossed it 
away in disgust. The newcomer is apt to be startled when he hears a 
Colombian casually mention paying $10,000 for a mule — until he 
realizes that the speaker is really talking in cents. The Colombian 
notes, even those of the intrinsic value of our copper coin, are elabo- 
rately engraved, and the wonder grew how the Government could 
afford to print them. 

For those who will exert themselves, even in the tropics, there is a 
splendid view of all Cartagena from La Popa, a hill standing forth 
Gibraltar-like above the inner harbor, on its nose a massive old church 
and fortress combined. From it the cruder details of the town, the 
startling pink and sky-blue of newer walls and balconies, fade to 
the general inconspicuousness of the more age-mellowed houses. The 
ancient red-tile roofs blend artistically into the patches of greensward 
and the light pink of royal ponciana trees; the whole city, edged by 
the landward-leaning cocoanut palms, is framed by a sea stretching 
away on either hand to the world's end. 

The half-grown Colombian of forty in charge of La Popa and the 
telescope and telephone by which incoming ships are reported, changed 
gradually from canny distrust to garrulous curiosity and invited us to 
inspect his entire domain. The purely academic dislike of Americans 
we soon found was overcome with little effort by those who addressed 
men of his class in their own tongue. Conversation at length drifted 
to sanitation in Panama, Colombia's " rebel province," as he called it. 

5 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

The fort-keeper listened to our tales in loose- jawed wonder and 
summed up his opinions of such gringo superstitions with : 

" But here we do none of those things, sefiores ! The mosquitos 
prick us every day, yet we are well." 

Our strange notion that disease could be carried by a mere insect 
was as absurd to him as was to us his own habit of relying for health 
on the plaster saint in the vaulted fortress church. 

Even in Panama information on travel in Colombia had been al- 
most as lacking as trust-worthy reports on the interior conditions of 
Mars. Only once in my five months on the Canal Zone had I run 
across even an ostensible source of knowledge. He was a native of 
Cali, and his answers had been distinctly Latin-American. 

" Does it rain much in your country?" I had asked him. 

" Si, senor, when it rains it is wet. When it does n't it is dry." 

"Is it cold?" 

" Si, senor, in the cold places it is cold, and in the hot places it is 
hot. No hay reglas fixas — there are no fixed rules." 

" How far is it from Cali to Popayan ? " 

" Ah, it is not near, senor." 

" About a hundred miles, perhaps ? " 

" Si, senor, just about that." 

" Is n't it rather about three hundred ? " 

" Pues, si, senor, perhaps just about that." 

There the matter had stood when we sailed. 

Once arrived in Cartagena, however, we found that a toy train left 
next day for Calamar on the Magdalena and that a second-class ticket 
to Honda, wherever that was, cost $2000! We had barely crammed 
ourselves into two seats of the little piano-box car next day when 
Hays started up with a snort and thrust the morning newspaper across 
at me. Done into English the item that had drawn his attention ran : 

" SOME ONE 

"who merits our entire confidence, informs us that yesterday there were in the 
"city, taking photographic views of our forts and most important edifices, two 
" foreign individuals who wore clothing of military cut of the cloth called 
"khaki, and felt hats with wide brim. This costume, as it has been described 
"to us, is that of the army of the United States! Can these really be Amer- 
" ican soldiers, or has a great outward similarity caused the suspicious imagina- 
" tion to see that which in reality did not exist ? We cannot assure it ! " 

We had hardly aspired to be taken for a hostile invasion from the 
dreaded " Colossus of the North." It was characteristic of Latin- 

6 



UP TO BOGOTA 

American thinking processes for the paragrapher to fancy that spies — 
for such the item covertly dubbed us — would appear in uniform. We 
had yet to learn, however, that the makers of newspaper, and of 
public opinion, in so far as it exists, in South America would often 
rank in our own land as irresponsible and poorly trained schoolboys. 

The miniature train, ambling away in a morning unoppressive in 
spite of the tropical sunshine, wound through a thin jungle, sometimes 
climbing, more often stopping at languorous, staring, thatched villages, 
in a region suffering from drought but of fertile appearance. By and 
by the jungle gave way to what might almost have been called prairie, 
slightly rolling and used only for grazing. Toward noon, beyond some 
swampy land, we clattered into the carelessly whitewashed town of 
Calamar, drowsing on the sandy bank of the Magdalena, here a half 
mile wide. Even before we jolted to a halt, the car filled with a strug- 
gling mob of beggars, shrill-voiced boys, and tattered men, eager, in 
their indolent tropical way, for some easy errand. Such unwonted 
energy soon evaporated. The population was of as mongrel a mixture 
as the yellow dogs that slunk about in the shade of trees and house 
walls, and appeared to hold identically the same attitude toward 
life. 

At length, in the cool of the following evening, the "Alicia " began 
to plow her way slowly upstream. She was a three-story craft with a 
huge paddle-wheel at the stern, her lower deck crowded with unas- 
sorted freight, domestic animals, engines and wood-piles, with deck 
hands, native passengers, pots and pans and unattractive habits. 
Among the most conspicuous of the latter were those of an open-air 
den that served as general kitchen. Twice a day a small tub of rice, 
boiled plantains and some meat mystery, all cooked in a single kettle, 
was carried out on one of the barges alongside, where it was fallen up- 
on not only by the lower-deck passengers but by the even darker-skinned 
deck hands, dressed in what had once been trousers and the wear- 
forever shirts so popular in this region. A few owned spoons and 
others a piece of cocoanut shell, but these were no handicap to the ma- 
jority, armed only with the utensils of nature. Little had we suspected 
the meaning of " second-class " on the Magdalena ! 

Luckily the English agent of the line had been so shocked at sight 
of our tickets, particularly, perhaps, in the hands of Hays, who was in 
appearance the hero of any of our modern romantic novels stepping 
bodily forth from the cardboard of any of our popular illustrators, 
that he had ordered the steward to overlook the color thereof and treat 

7 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

us as cabin passengers. On the upper deck the steamer was open from 
stem to stern, a dining table stretching along her center and the sides 
lined by frail, box-like " staterooms." The little canvas cots, narrow 
as the charpoys of India, used alike by passengers and the unlaundered 
youths that passed for stewards, were dragged to any part of the craft 
that suited the whims of the sleeper. Our drinking water was the 
native Magdalena, sometimes carelessly filtered through a porous 
stone. There was even a shower-bath — when the paddle-wheel was 
elevating enough of the, chocolate-colored river water to permit it to 
" function " — but it generally took most of the morning and all the 
stewards to find the misplaced key. 

Frequently for days at a time there were only the two of us to occupy 
the cane rocking-chairs that embellished the upper foredeck. Here day 
after day we watched the monotonous yellow bank unroll with infinite 
slowness, like a film clogged in the machine. The country, flat, con- 
siderably wooded, and characterless, stood only a few feet above the 
river, its soil sandy, though not without fertility, with occasional clear- 
ings and many immense spreading trees. Here and there on the ex- 
treme edge of the stream hung a few scattered thatched villages, all 
apparently engaged in the favorite occupation of doing nothing, living 
on the few fruits and vegetables that grew themselves and drinking 
the yellow Magdalena pure. 

At such times there was nothing left but to while away the languid 
hours in perfecting our plans for the journey ahead. For once I had 
chanced upon a traveling companion who had actually started when 
the hour of departure came, and who bade fair to pursue the expedition 
to the bitter end. Leo Hays had first seen the light — such as it is in 
Missouri — six months later than I, but had overcome that initial 
handicap by deflecting the sun's rays in many a varying clime. The 
schools had early scowled upon him — or he upon them — and he had 
retaliated by gathering in his own way much that schools have never 
hoarded away in their impregnable warehouses. The gleaning had car- 
ried him far afield, in social strata as well as physical distance, but it 
had left him unburdened with the bric-a-brac of life so dear to the 
bourgeois soul. Wasteful of money and the petty things of life, he was 
never wasteful of life itself. He was of those who look at the world 
through a wide-angle lens. There is a breadth of vision gained in an 
existence varying from. " hobo " printer and editor in our pulsating 
Southwest to sugar estate overseer in the Guianas, from the forecastle 
to the Moro villages of the Philippines, that makes a formal educa- 

8 



UP TO BOGOTA 

tion seem cramped and restricted by comparison. To those who did 
not know the Canal Zone in its halcyon days a mere corporal of police 
demanding of himself the ability to converse intelligently a half hour 
on any subject from astronomy to Norse literature, from heraldry to 
Urdu philosophy, may seem a fantastic figure. To the experienced 
" Zoner " it is commonplace. 

On Sunday morning the entire village of Zambrano, headed by its 
curate and dressed in every imaginable misfit of sun-bleached gaiety, 
swarmed on board and subjected us to a leisurely detailed examina- 
tion that gave us the sensation of being museum exhibits. The 
" Alicia " was soon off again and we came to the conclusion that the 
town was migrating en masse. A few hundred yards beyond, how- 
ever, we tied up to the bank once more and waited a long hour while 
all Zambrano took leave of the priest. Every inhabitant under fifteen 
kissed his hand, which each of the women pressed fervently, some 
several times over, after which the men approached him in procession, 
padre and layman throwing an arm about each other's neck and slapping 
each other some seven times each between the shoulder-blades. It 
was only the customary Colombian abrazo and the formality of see- 
ing the curate a little way on his journey. Meanwhile our half-Indian 
boy captain stood smilingly by, twisting the two tiny sprigs of mus- 
tache that gave him so striking a resemblance to a Chinese mandarin 
turned river pirate. He was far too good a Catholic to cut short 
the leave-taking even had he guessed that anyone on board chaffed at 
the delay. The day was much older before we crawled out into the 
middle of the stream again. But no man journeys up to Bogota 
hastily. The Land of Hurry was behind us. 

When we addressed him, the priest answered us courteously enough, 
then dropped the conversation in a manner to suggest that he did not 
care to pursue it further. Like his fellow-countrymen in general he 
seemed to have no hunger for knowledge, no notion that he might 
learn from others. The attitude of all the upper-deck passengers was 
as if an edict had gone forth to dislike Americans. Individually none 
had any grievance against us, collectively they seemed banded to- 
gether in a species of intellectual boycott, which none of them vented 
to the extent of losing his reputation for politeness. Their manner 
suggested pouting children, unwilling to declare their fancied griev- 
ances and fight them out like men. 

There were a half dozen of us at table that evening, with the 
priest in the place of honor at the head. The meal passed without a 

9 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

spoken word, at racehorse speed. It recalled a placard I had seen in 
a Texas restaurant on my journey southward: "Eat first, THEN 
talk," and amid the opening chorus Hays' memory harked back to a 
sign that once embellished a Bowery institution : " Soup should be 
seen and not heard." That we paused for speech between mouthfuls 
seemed to fill our companions with a mixture of disgust and amaze- 
ment. It was perilous, too, for ragged, barefooted waiters more 
numerous than the diners, hovered over us, quick to snatch away the 
plate of anyone who dared raise his head. How unlike the sociable 
meals of Spain was this silent wolfing ! 

Their own parents could not have distinguished one meal from an- 
other. The soup was always of the general collection variety, the 
two vegetables incessantly the same ; the beef varied from the hope- 
lessly tough to the suspiciously tender; for the system on the river 
steamers of the Magdalena is to slaughter a steer on the lower 
deck the first morning of the voyage and serve it twice daily until 
passengers are unanimous in leaving their plates untouched, then 
regretfully to lead another gloomy, raw-boned animal forth to slaughter. 
Yet no one could have complained on the score of quantity. We no 
longer wondered at the sallow flabbiness of those about us in spite of 
their life in the open air. 

The voracious engines of the " Alicia " required more halting than 
movement. Barely had we left the faint lights of Calamar astern 
when we tied up for hours before a woodpile in the edge of the 
jungle, and never did a half day pass without a long halt to replenish 
the fuel. The sight of a bamboo hut or a cluster of thatched shacks 
crouched in a little semicircular space gouged out of the immense 
forest was sure to bring a shrill scream from the whistle and in the 
soft air of evening we crawled up to a tiny clearing where perhaps 
thirty cords of wood lay awaiting a purchaser. They were heavy 
slabs some three feet long, the piles separated by upright poles into 
divisions called burros, the conventional load, perhaps, of one ass. 
On the utter edge of the bank hung a miserable little hut swarming 
with dogs and equally unwashed human beings. There were the usual 
endless manceuvers to a mooring, then the entire crew went ashore 
on the heels of the captain, armed with his measuring stick. He and 
the woodsman, a sturdy, bashful fellow, gave each other the cus- 
tomary greeting pat on the shoulder, then stood a long time, each 
with a hand on the woodpile, discussing the details of the imminent 
financial transaction. 

10 



UP TO BOGOTA 

But they could not come to terms, and at length the steamer popula- 
tion returned on board and for ten minutes with much ringing of bells 
and screeching of whistles the " Alicia " went through the pretence 
of getting under way. The woodsman held his ground, though his 
wood looked as if he had already held it several years. At length 
we returned to the same mooring and a wash-basin of boiled beef and 
plantains was carried ashore as a peace offering. This time we struck 
a bargain, and the two populations exchanged places. The country- 
men, of all ages and both sexes, many with evidences of loathsome 
diseases, one limping on a foot white with leprosy, swarmed into every 
corner of the craft, gazing open-mouthed at her unbelievable magnifi- 
cence, sitting cautiously down in the deck chairs, thrusting their fingers 
into the saucers of dessert that had been set out an hour or two before 
meal time to give the flies fair play, passing from hand to hand 
anything that caught their fancy. Their protruding bellies suggested 
that the hookworm was prevalent. The men wore over one shoulder 
a satchel-like pouch called a garniel, for their clothing was not such as 
might safely have been entrusted with their minor possessions. 

Meanwhile we had taken advantage of the opportunity to stretch 
our legs ashore, for whatever their faults these jungle people are not 
addicted to thievery. Under the edge of the forest, into the dense 
green depths of which we could wander a little way amid a wealth of 
woodland aromas and the fitful songs of birds, was planted a little 
field of corn, the stalks a full ten feet high, even the ears in many 
cases well above our heads, though the jungle was thick between the 
rows and there was no sign of other labor than the planting. A bit 
of sugarcane grew as luxuriantly, and behind the hut stood a crude 
trapiche, or cane crusher, a mere stump and lever above a dug-out 
trough. Palm, gourd, mango, and papaya trees, the females of the 
latter heavy with fruit and the males gay with yellow blossoms, sug- 
gested that the spot might have been one of the most flourishing 
gardens on earth had the inhabitants any other industry or desire 
than to roll about on their earth floors. From a corner of the patch 
the stewards cut long reeds and made trumpets of exactly the sound 
of army bugles. 

The houses of the region are very simply built. Four posts, some 
six inches in diameter and rising as many feet above the ground, are 
set at the corners of the house to be. Halfway between these are 
set four smaller upright poles, giving each wall three supports. 
Along the tops of these, saplings about four inches in diameter are 

II 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

tied with green vines, after which pole rafters are raised. Across 
these, six to eight inches apart, are laid strips of split bamboo, also 
tied with vines. The roof is then thatched with dried banana leaves, 
laid lengthwise with the slope of the roof, those underneath secured 
by being bent over the bamboo strips, and layer after layer of them 
piled on until the thatch is a foot or more thick. Two poles, tied 
some distance apart with green vines, are then thrown over the peak 
of the roof to keep a sudden gust of wind from lifting the shelter off 
the dwellers' heads, and the residence is ready for occupancy. 

The deck hands, each wearing on his head a grain sack split up one 
side, stood in file beside the diminishing woodpile. When his turn 
came, each grasped the end of his sack in the right hand and held the 
arm at full length while others heaped it high with cordwood. As 
soon as he had what he considered a reasonable amount, the carrier 
threw a rope held in his left hand over the load, caught it deftly in the 
already burdened right and, pulling it taut, marched down some twenty 
feet of perpendicular sandy bank and across a wobbly eight-inch 
plank without a quiver. We envied them the exercise at every land- 
ing, but even to have carried a stick on board would have been not only 
to lose our own caste but to jeopardize that of all our fellow-country- 
men. 

Nothing would be more futile than to attempt to describe the tropical 
sunset, exceeded in beauty, if at all, only by sunrise, as it spread 
across this flat jungle and forest country, the curving river and wood- 
lands. On into the night the languid wood loading continued, lighted 
up in irregular patches by the lamps of the steamer and flickering oil 
torches ashore. Long after dark, as the last of the burros was disap- 
pearing, the jungle dweller came on board in person and fixed upon 
me to figure up how much he had coming, openly putting his faith 
in a foreigner in preference to a native. There were 119 burros, for 
which he was to receive fourteen cents each. It totalled $16.66, or, as 
it sounded to him, $1666, and by and by the purser, who would no 
doubt have beaten him a few hundred dollars in the multiplication 
but for my pencil, came out of his cabin with an Australian gold sov- 
ereign and an immense handful of Colombian bills. I asked the re- 
cipient how long he had worked to get the pile together and received 
the expected South American answer: 

" Ay ! Muchos soles, sefior, — many suns," which of course was as 
exact as he could be about it. Strangely enough he resisted the wheed- 
ling of the ragged stewards to exchange his fortune for the cheap 

12 



UP TO BOGOTA 

straw hats and brass rings they carried for sale and got safely ashore 
with the entire handful of what, in these wilds, could not have been of 
any great practical value. 

As we pushed off, the captain announced that we had wood enough 
to last until the following noon. One would have fancied we had 
enough to last to the seventh circle and back. Here we could still 
" march " all night, for the river was deep in spite of its great width. 
As we sat in solitary glory on the upper deck watching the blood-red 
moon come up out of the jungle, Hays suddenly broke off a disserta- 
tion on the philosophy of life of Marcus Aurelius to exclaim: 

" We ought to swear off on this. If we 're going to walk along the 
top of the Andes we '11 need all the chest expansion we 've got," and 
suiting the action to the word, he chucked his half-smoked $5 cigar 
overboard. It was not until late next morning that I saw him light 
the next one. 

" But I thought you 'd sworn off ? " I reminded him. 

" That 's the great value of resolutions," he answered, " you make 
them to break them and feel the genuine freedom of life. But to- 
morrow I '11 swear off in earnest " — which he did, almost daily as 
long as the journey lasted. Meanwhile, my birthday making a good 
date for it, I gave up the habit definitely myself, none too sure of its 
effect in the lofty altitudes before us. 

We moved at about the speed of a log-raft towed by a sunfish. 
Whenever there was danger of our making a reasonable Colombian 
distance the whistle was sure to sound and we drifted inshore to tie 
up for hours before another woodpile. Sometimes the flat, disappoint- 
ing banks of the river were sheer for miles, with unbroken stretches 
of swamp grass six feet high so dense it did not seem that a snake 
could have wormed its way through it. The cerulean blue skies were 
equal to any of Italy, the light clouds wandering lazily across them 
sometimes forming in battle array on the rim of the horizon. Here 
and there were considerable fields of sugarcane about a thatched vil- 
lage; but the vast fertile territory was almost entirely virgin and 
uncleared. One morning a cry of " Caiman ! " called attention to a 
point of sand on which lay a score of alligators, most of which slid 
sluggishly off into the stream as we approached. Thereafter we had 
only to glance along the banks to be almost sure of seeing several. 

For some days Hays and I had made up the deck passenger list 
unassisted, sitting through our meals in dignified silence with some 
half-dozen waiters to miswait on us — when we could get their at- 

r 3 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

tention — headed by the chief steward, who never tired of boasting 
that he had once made cigars in the shadow of Ancon police station. 
His underlings received six dollars a month, such food as they could 
forage, and the righ£ to wear what the passage of years had left of 
misfit cotton uniforms, to be turned in at the end of the trip. They 
were obliged to pay for all breakages, and life was indeed slender with 
only two economical gringos as passengers. The arrival of a new 
pasajero was in consequence always an exciting event. Five days up, 
in the region known as the Opon country, there appeared on board a 
native trapper of wild animals, who had been shot through the face 
by an arrow of the savage Opones, but had performed the rare feat 
of making his escape. Colombia includes within her confines several 
tribes of Indians not only uninfluenced by the government, but without 
an inkling of its existence. The Opones live far back along the tribu- 
taries of the Magdalena, descending them only in certain seasons, and 
attacking any human beings they come upon. Armed with a species 
of archbow, they shoot an enormous arrow with a point of iron-hard 
black palm barbed both ways, that can neither be pushed through nor 
pulled out of the body of the victim. The arrow the trapper brought 
with him could barely be forced into his long trunk after being broken 
in two, and five cruel barbs still remained after several others had been 
cut off and left in the body of his former companion. A few weeks 
before, he reported, a harmless fellow fishing somewhat back from 
the main river had been made the veritable pincushion of thirty-two 
such arrows. The trapper had it that the Opones were cannibals, 
asserting that a recent expedition into the Opon country had found a 
Colombian woman of good family who was being fattened in a cage 
of bamboo, but whom the savages had not yet eaten because of a sus- 
picious sore on her leg. 

Gradually low shadowy mountains began to appear in the far 
blue distance, with suggestions of higher ones in the clouds behind 
them. On the seventh day a long rugged chain, the Sierra de Peraja 
in the Province of Santander, had grown so near that separate peaks 
and suggestions of villages could be picked out of the sunlit distance. 
Next morning we were half surrounded by deep blue ranges, and the 
banks were broad natural meadows with hundreds of cattle knee-deep 
in rich green grass. Magnificent spreading trees now stood out against 
the sky and ranges. The nights had grown so cool that we took to 
sleeping in our " stateroom " — with barely room enough left to sneeze 
when our cots had been dragged in. Here we began to go aground 

14 



UP TO BOGOTA 

frequently, for the tendency of the Magdalena is to spread out more 
and more as her sandy banks keep falling into the river. At our speed 
the experience was hardly hair-raising, and generally in the course of 
a few hours the " Alicia " worked herself loose again. There were 
almost no other water craft, except an occasional canoa, a dug-out log 
crawling along the extreme lower edge of the forest wall. Now and 
then we passed large balsas, rafts of hundreds of immense cedar logs, 
with the Colombian flag at the prow and the crew camped aft with 
mat beds, primitive kitchens, and sometimes their women and a numer- 
ous progeny. Great trees, which the captain called ceibas, rose slim 
and clear more than a hundred feet, to end in a parasol tuft of 
branches. Frequently a flock of parrakeets screamed noisily by over- 
head. In places we crawled along between sheer sand banks, gigantic 
trees of the dense forest hanging on the brink of miniature Culebra 
slides as the river washed under them. 

Higher still the stream grew so shallow that we could " march " 
only by day, anchoring at dark. One night we tied up to the bank on 
an inner curve of the river, where the forest cut off the breeze com- 
pletely and left us to toss in our cots until dawn. . Its first glimmer of 
light showed that we had reached Pureto Berrio, where a little narrow- 
gage starts — I use the word advisedly, for it never gets there — for 
Medellin, second city of Colombia. The " port " itself suspended 
whatever it was in the habit of doing to stare at us in long silent rows 
from the doorways. Its male population not only wore no shirt but 
did not even trouble to conceal that fact by buttoning its tattered sun- 
bleached jacket. All the natives seemed obsessed with the notion that, 
as gringos, we could not speak Spanish. As often as we addressed 
one, though our Castilian vocabulary was as ample and our pronuncia- 
tion far less slovenly than his own, he refused to believe his senses 
until the sensation had been several times repeated. 

We were off again by noon. It had been raining in the highlands 
beyond and the visibly rising river was half covered with patches of 
thick scum. Now and then it bore by on its swift silent surface a 
fragment of forest snatched from somewhere above. We were now 
some hundreds of feet above sea-level, and the forest air was fragrant 
and unfevered. All day long nothing but forest trailed by. We 
passed timber enough in a week to supply the world for a century and 
rich soil enough to feed a large section of it permanently. But only 
very rarely did a little bamboo hut, roofed with leaves, dot the 
monotony of virgin nature. The river had narrowed down to a placid 

15 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

powerful stream ; the weather was peerless, though an almost invisible 
gnat began to make life less motionless. 

In the purple gloaming a forest-built village of some size stood out 
more picturesquely than usual on the nose of a land billow jutting 
forth and falling sheer into the river, only to have the interminable 
forest swallow it up again. Yet there were signs that we were ap- 
proaching somewhere or other. Hays sat with his feet on the rail, 
discoursing on the relative merits of Turgeniev and Galdos, the point 
of his " last " cigar glowing in the darkness, when the captain passed 
with a package wrapped in the customary inofficiency of Latin-America. 

" Here, I used to be one," said Hays, reaching for the bundle and 
rearranging it. 

" Used to be what ? " I asked, as he handed it back. 

" I was walking along the street of — of — well I don't remember 
the stage setting, but it must have been in the States and a long time 
ago," he began, lighting a second cigar from the butt of the first, " for 
I know I had n't been to sea or in the army yet, when I saw a sign in 
a window, ' Bundle Wrapper Wanted.' I had to pass up a hundred 
per as outside man for a medicine faker to take it, but it was some- 
thing new and . . ." and he rambled off into one of those experience 
sketches which, jumping erratically over the face of the globe, fre- 
quently enlivened the voyage. 

In the last hours of June we bumped against the wharf of La 
Dorada, several hundred yards of tinware building along a sloping 
river front with a childish attempt at paving, its main street a forlorn 
pathway near the water's edge, dying away in the forest- jungle on 
either hand. Here we took our leave of the " Alicia," for cataracts 
make this the end of the run for steamers plying the lower Magda- 
lena. Next afternoon a train even more diminutive than that to Cala- 
mar wound away in a half circle into the forest, with now and then 
glimpses of hazy, far-off Andean ranges, and three hours later set us 
down in Honda. To our surprise we found it a city, the first since 
Cartagena, as aged and intricate, as full of its own local color, includ- 
ing many blind and leprous beggars, as any town of old Spain. Piled 
close along the Magdalena, here a series of rocky rapids, it is divided 
by a gurgling tributary across which three picturesque bridges fling 
themselves. Scores of aged stone buildings, quaint walls, and steep 
streets of century-old pavements give it an air reminiscent of Bruges 
or Niirnberg, or of some of the ancient towns of Mexico. Its narrow 
streets are crowded with laden mules and sunbrowned arrieros of both 

16 




A village on the banks of the Magdalena 




Jirardot; end of the steamer line and beginning of the railroad to Bogota 



UP TO BOGOTA 

sexes ; its patios seem primeval forests, and mountain ranges cut its 
horizon close off in every direction. A muleteer pointed out to us the 
ancient trail to Bogota where it crossed a high red bridge and climbed 
steeply away up one of the natural walls of the town on the way to 
Facatativa on the lofty plateau above. But for our baggage we should 
have struck out for the capital on this route of centuries. 

We went on by rail in the morning. Every woman and girl in the 
car — not to mention Hays — was smoking the jet-black cigars of the 
region. The little engine with its top-heavy smokestack consumed 
wood as gluttonously as the " Alicia," and halted even more often to 
replenish its supply. Colombians fancy railroads will work the com- 
plete regeneration of their torpid country, but such as we had seen 
were only miniature samples of the real thing, of slight practical value 
even were they extended all over the republic. The natives had no 
notion, however, that the word train did not stand for the same tiny 
contraptions the world over as that to which they applied it. 

On all sides were enormous stadiums of mountains, not yet high but 
already bulking and rock-strewn. Drought had left the country 
desert-dry and fine sand drifted in and deposited itself upon us in 
shrouds, as in crossing Nevada. The landscape suggested a cross be- 
tween the tropics and a western prairie choking for rain, as did even 
the towns with their frontiersman disarray, their burros, mules and 
broken-down horses drooping in any patch of shade. Tattered boys 
and diseased loafers swarmed into the cars at every stop, drinking 
from the water jars, washing in the bowls of the first-class coach, 
making themselves completely at home without a suggestion of pro- 
test from the trainmen. Even were there laws against such actions, 
the languid officials would have lacked the moral courage to enforce 
them. 

The railway ended at Beltran, where we boarded the steamer 
" Caribe." A dreary, sun-baked collection of sheds and a few choking 
huts made up the town, completely surrounded by desert, with plenty 
of bushy trees, but a desert for all that. The wind that swept across 
the steamer at her mooring was not the cool one of the lower Magda- 
lena, but one laden with red-hot sands that stung the cheeks like tiny 
insects. When the passengers had gulped their almuerzo, the dishes 
were piled in the alleyway, where beggars and gaunt boys from the 
shore came to claw around in them, after which they were roughly 
half-washed. There is a fetching democracy about the road to Bogota. 
He who travels it, be he vagrant or man of wealth, must go through 

17 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the same uninviting experiences. It speaks poorly of Colombians that 
they still endure this medieval method of travel from the outside 
world to their capital. Wealthy bogotanos journey to Europe in 
luxurious style — once they are on the ocean. It would seem wiser 
for them to return steerage and gradually accustom themselves to what 
they must endure from the landing in their own country to the arrival 
in Bogota. 

All day long we sat in the sand-burning winds of Beltran while 
barefoot and half-naked stevedores dribbled down the steep bank with 
all manner of cargo. There was barbed wire from Massachusetts, 
corrugated iron from Pittsburg, boxed street-car lines that clattered 
and crashed as they fell, and finally, though by no means last, four 
pianos from Germany that were rolled heels over head down the long 
stony bank. Although we had real cabin tickets this time, neither of 
us had influence enough to get a cabin. We dragged our cots out on 
the open deck and, indifferent to social rules, marched through the 
multitude in our pajamas. This turned out to be entirely comme il 
faut, for even the son of a recent president of Colombia soon appeared 
similarly clad and strolled about the deck chattering with his fetlow- 
passengers of both sexes, as nonchalantly as if in full dress. 

We were not off until dawn, into which the volcano Ruiz, first of 
the long row of snow-clad fire-vents of the Andes which we hoped in 
time to see disappear over our shoulders, thrust its aged head. Rock 
cliffs along the banks recalled the Lorelei. Fields of corn undulated 
like wind-snatched hair on the summits of rounded hills, at the base 
of which sweltered the banana groves of the tropics. As the sun was 
setting we passed a chorro at the foot of a low range around which 
the river had swept in a half-circle so many centuries that its bank 
was a sheer rock wall surely sixty feet high. The " Caribe," with 
the nose of a washtub, panted for life against the current, spitting 
showers of live coals from her wood fires, seeming several times about 
to give up the attempt in despair. But she gained the calmer water 
above at last and soon after dark landed us in Jirardot. 

We spent the Fourth of July in Jirardot. Not by choice, but because 
the train to the capital leaves only three times a week. The town 
swelters by day on the edge of the curving river, here hardly fifty 
yards wide, where for more than a mile stretches a vista of donkeys 
laden with kegs of water, bands of women, all more or less African 
in ancestry, bathing, washing, and incessantly smoking immense mis- 
shapen cigars, as do even the children of both sexes that paddle stark 

18 



UP TO BOGOTA 

naked about the bank in complete immunity to the blazing sun. The 
place seemed the headquarters of contented poverty. At least half 
the inhabitants either had not enough sun-bleached garments to com- 
pletely conceal their dusky skins, or had laid them away for more gala 
occasions. Beggars, halt, blind, misformed and idiotic, were almost 
as numerous as in similar towns of India. Even the less miserable 
inhabitants were dull, neurasthenic, utterly devoid of energy, anemics 
with incessant smoking, bad food, and worse habits, given to living 
entirely according to their appetites and never according to will power 
and reason. 

It was not without misgiving that we turned our faces toward 
Bogota next morning. The crowd which the train from the plateau 
had landed the night before had been half hidden under the rugs, 
blankets, and overcoats they carried, and not a native of Jirardot could 
speak of the capital without visibly shivering, some even crossing 
themselves as often as they heard it mentioned. The train left at sun- 
rise. By the rules of the line — the " Ferrocarril de Jirardot " — we 
were obliged to check our baggage containing all extra clothing. For 
the first few hours we were surrounded by mountains, though still on 
a slightly rising plain between them. The land appeared fertile and 
there was considerable Indian corn, yet it was surprising to find here 
in the capacious New World such swarms of beggars as in Egypt or 
India. The population along the way, increasingly Indian in blood, 
was extraordinarily slow-witted. In a window near us sat a com- 
mercial traveler who tossed at every one he caught sight of along the 
way a pictorial advertisement of an American panacea. The tail of 
the train was always well past them before a single one gathered his 
wits sufficiently to pick up the treasure. 

Near noon we were ourselves picked out by a mountain-climbing 
engine, made in Schenectady, its boiler well forward and flanked by 
the water tanks, a small upright coalbin behind. As we began a series 
of switchbacks, I caught a breath of virile white man's air for the first 
time in a half year, and the taste of it was so delicious that the sensa- 
tion reached to my tingling toes. Regularly the vista of gouged-out 
valleys surrounded by rough-hewn, cool, blue ranges spread to greater 
distances. Passengers began to turn red-nosed, to put on overcoats, 
blankets, rugs, ponchos, gloves, to wrap towels about their necks. To 
me the temperature was delightful, but Hays, who had been long years 
in the tropics, took to applying other adjectives. 

Now the landscape of meadows and grazing cattle backed by tower- 

19 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

ing mountains suggested Switzerland. Beyond the one tunnel of the 
line we entered an immense valley walled by row upon row of blue 
ranges. Higher still, the bleak, stony highlands resembled a more 
rugged Scotland in late October, though cultivation was almost general 
and roads numerous. It struck us as strange that human beings should 
shiver and toil for a scant livelihood in such surroundings when a 
day's walk would bring them to perpetual summer and nature's well 
filled larder. A plant must remain where it chances to be born, but 
why should man also ? 

By four, the train had finished its task of lifting its breathless 
passengers into the thin air of Facatativa, and scores of half-frozen 
barefoot children and ragged adults dismally wandered the stony 
streets. A policeman muffled to the ears assured us with what seemed 
a suggestion of pride that Facatativa was even colder than Bogota, for 
which Hays gave fervent thanks. Evidently the heat of the tropics 
was yet in my blood, for I still felt comfortable. 

An hour later we were speeding across a broad plateau by the 
" Ferrocarril de la Sabana," a government railroad equipped with real 
trains of American cars. All the languor and ragged indifference of 
the tropics seemed to have been left forever behind. The conductor 
was as business-like — and as light in color — as any in our own land. 
We stopped briefly at towns boasting all the adjuncts of civilized life, 
somehow dragged up to these lofty realms. Here was a country built 
from the center outwardly; the nearer we came to its capital, the 
further we left the world behind, the more modern and well furnished 
did it become. It recalled fanciful tales of men who, toiling for weeks 
through unknown wildernesses, suddenly burst forth upon an un- 
known valley filled with all the splendors of an ancient kingdom. 

Yet we could not but wonder why, once they had reached this lofty 
plateau, the discoverers had not halted and built their city, instead 
of marching far back across it to the foot of the enclosing range. A 
full thirty-five miles the train fled across the sabana, an immense plain 
in appearance like one of our north in early April, intersected here 
and there by barbed-wire fences. Broad yellow fields of mustard 
appeared, spread, and disappeared behind us. Great droves of cattle 
frisked about in the autumn air as if to keep warm. Well-built coun- 
try dwellings flashed by, stony and bare in setting, but embellished 
with huge paintings of landscapes on the walls under the veranda 
roofs. The sun had barely smiled upon us since noon. Now as the 
day declined I began to grow cold, bitter cold, colder than I had been 

20 

















-^ISHH 






ISi 


..-" '■ 


..;.. ,-*>-» 




- .* "' ' ' ; * ' '"■ .v.' . 














■ 'i£#3 • mm 


apt 














"' 


' " jL"*- ' 


JLl."-. .. 


^P* 4|| 







A typical Indian hut on the outskirts of Bogota 






Indian girls and women are the chief dray-horses of the Colombian capital 



UP TO BOGOTA 

since descending from the Mexican plateau seven months before, 
while Hays' hat brim shook with his shivering. Our fellow-passen- 
gers looked like summer excursionists unexpectedly caught in straw 
hats by grim, relentless winter. Then as evening descended the plain 
came abruptly to an end, and at the very foot of a forbidding black 
mountain range spread a cold, smokeless city of bulking domes and 
towers. We had reached at last, after eighteen days of travel, the 
most isolated of South American capitals. 



21 



CHAPTER II 

THE CLOISTERED CITY 

OUR entrance into Bogota was not exactly what we had 
planned or anticipated. The crowd that filled the station 
and its adjacent streets in honor of the thrice-weekly linking 
with the outside world was dressed like an American city in February, 
except that here black was more general and choking high collars and 
foppish canes far more in evidence. Wherefore, seeing two men of 
foreign aspect, visibly shivering in their strange feather-weight uni- 
forms, .descending upon them, the pulsating throng could be dispersed 
only with difficulty, and excited urchins raced beside the horse car 
that set us down at last before a recommended hotel. Hays, who was 
nothing if not self-conscious, as well as tropical blooded, lost no time 
in putting on every wool garment his baggage contained and dived 
under four blankets vowing never to be seen again in public. 

We seemed to have reached the very center of this incongruous 
civilization of the isolated fastnesses of the Andes. Our suite took up 
an entire second-story corner of the hotel. There were carpets in 
which our feet sank half out of sight, capacious upholstered chairs, 
divans in every corner, tables that might have graced a French 
chateau, pier glass mirrors, gleaming chandeliers, lamps with double 
burners, in addition to electric lights. Our parlor, its huge windows 
resplendent with lace curtains, opened on a balcony overhanging the 
street, as did also the adjoining bedroom, as richly furnished and with 
two old-fashioned colonial bedsteads heaped high with mattresses, 
their many blankets covered with glossy vicuna hides. We were far 
indeed from the frontiersman steamers of the Magdalena. When the 
hunger of the highlands asserted itself, we sneaked down to a luxurious 
diningroom to find the menu and service equal to that of some 
travelers' palace on the Champs Elysees. The sumptuous breakfast 
that a maid placed beside our beds next morning was a humorous con- 
trast to those we had endured on the " Alicia." Yet all these luxuries, 
borne to this lofty isolation by methods the most primitive known to 
modern days, were ours at the paltry rate of $1.50 a day. Truly, the 
cost of high living had not yet reached the altitude of Bogota. 

22 



THE CLOISTERED CITY 

It was evident, however, that if we were to live here as anything but 
public curiosities we must patronize a clothing store. The Zone cos- 
tume, so splendidly adapted to our future plans, was, unfortunately, 
original for bogotanos; and nowhere does originality of garb cause 
greater furore than in the mountain-cloistered capital of Colombia. 
When we summoned up courage to venture forth, Hays dodged into 
the first tailor shop that crossed his path, and instantly agreed to take 
whatever happened to be offered him, at any price the tailor chose to 
inflict — and returned to remain in hiding for the ensuing twenty-four 
hours until the articles were altered. Meanwhile I sallied forth from 
a ready-made establishment, inconspicuous in a native shirt that came 
perilously near being born a pa jama and a heavy, temporarily black, 
suit of " cashmere " with a misgiving tightness across the trousers. 

On second thought it was not surprising that this far away city of 
the Andes should be so exacting in dress. Virtually cut off from the 
world, it was supremely eager to appear cosmopolitan. The result is 
a tailor's paradise. No one who aspires to be ranked among the 
gente decente ever dreams of permitting himself to be seen in public 
lacking any detail of the equipment, from derby to patent leathers, that 
makes up the bogotano's mental picture of a Parisian boulevardier. 
At first we took this multitude of faultlessly dressed men to mean that 
the city rolled in wealth. As time went on many a dandy of fashion 
we had fancied a bank president, or the son of some prince of finance, 
turned out to be a side-street barber, or the keeper of a four-by-six 
book-stall, if not indeed without even so legitimate a source of income. 
It is due, no doubt, to some misinterpretation of the European fashion 
sheets that the main street corners were habitually blocked long before 
noon by men and youths in Prince Alberts, who spent the greater part 
of the day leaning with Parisian nonchalance on silver-headed canes. 

The women of the better class, on the other hand, are never seen 
disguised as Parisians except on rare gala occasions. At morning 
mass, or in their circumspect tours of shopping, they appear swathed 
from head to foot in the black manto, a shawl-like thing of thin 
texture wound about head and body to the hips and leaving only a bit 
of the face and a bare glimpse of their blue-black hair visible. To us 
the costume was pleasing in its simplicity. Bogotanos, however, com- 
plain that it is triste — sad, and in time we too came to have that im- 
pression, as if the sex had gone perpetually into mourning for the 
ways of its male relatives. 

The great underlying mass of the population has no requirements in 

23 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the matter of dress. In general the gente del pueblo — the " men of 
the people " — wear shoddy trousers of indeterminate hue, alpargatas, 
— hemp soles held in place by strips of canvas — without socks, a 
soiled " panama " always very much out of place in this climate, and, 
covering all else, a ruana, or native-woven blanket with a hole in the 
center through which to thrust the head. Their women rarely wear 
black, but simple gowns of some light color, at least on Sundays, after 
which its whiteness decreases. They go commonly bareheaded, often 
barefooted, and always stockingless. Every scene from street to 
Cathedral shrine is enlivened by the bare legs of women and girls 
often decidedly attractive in appearance — to those who have no great 
prejudice for the bath. 

To be nearer the center of activities we had taken a room in the 
third story of the municipal building, on the site of the palace of the 
viceroys. Down below lay the main plaza of Colombia, Tenerani's 
celebrated statue of Bolivar in its center, the still unfinished capitol 
building cutting it off on the right. Across the square we could look 
in at the door of the ancient Cathedral — and shake our fists at its 
constantly clanging bells. Beyond, much of the city spread out be- 
fore us, the thatched huts of misery spilling a little way up the foot 
of the dismal black range that filled in the rest of the picture. 

The altitude of Bogota — it stands 8630 feet above the level of 
the sea — seldom fails to impress itself upon the newcomer. Many 
travelers do not risk the sudden ascent from Jirardot to the capital 
in a single day, but stop over between trains at a halfway town. 
During the first days I was content to march slowly a few blocks up 
and down her slightly inclined streets, and even then found myself 
with the faint third cousin of a headache, several mild attacks of 
nose bleed, and a soreness of all the body as if from undue pressure 
of the blood. Until the first effects wear away, energy is at its 
lowest ebb and time passes on leaden wings. The change in mood 
is as marked as in the character of the permanent inhabitants. From 
the moment of his arrival the traveler feels again that foresighted, 
looking-to-the-future attitude toward life common to the temperate 
zone. All the light, airy, gay and wasteful ways of Panama and 
the tropics fade away like the memory of some former existence, 
and it is easy to understand why the bogotano is quite different in 
temperament from the languid inhabitants along the Magdalena. 
Unlike many regions of high altitude, however, Bogota is not a 
" nervous " city. There are lower places in Mexico, for instance, 

24 



THE CLOISTERED CITY 

where the nerves seem always at a tension. Here we felt serene and 
unexcited all day long as in the first hours of waking from long 
refreshing sleep. 

Except in the actual sunshine, the air was raw even at noon. The 
wind from off the backing range or across the sabana cut through 
our garments as if they were of cheesecloth. The thermometer falls 
much lower in other climes, but here artificial heat is unknown, and 
a more penetrating cold is inconceivable. By night the bogotano 
wears an overcoat of the greatest obtainable thickness, he dines and 
goes to the theater in a temperature that would make outdoor New 
York in early November seem cozy and hospitable. Well dressed 
men in gloves and overcoats and women in furs walking briskly across 
the square below our window on their way from the electric street 
cars to the theater or the " Circo Keller," gave the scene quite the 
appearance of a similar one in an American town in the first days of 
winter. Yet this was July and we were barely five degrees from the 
equator. Beside us lay the latest newspapers from New York, half 
way to the north pole, bristling with such items as : " Wanted — 
Cool rooms for the summer months." " Four Dead of Heat Pros- 
tration." It is a peculiar climate. Flowers — of some Arctic species 
— bloom perennially, and the poorer people, inured to it from birth, 
seem to thrive in bare legs and summer garb. Frost is virtually un- 
known, not because the temperature does not warrant it, but because 
what would be frost elsewhere evaporates in the thin air. Once the 
sun has set, nothing seems quite so attractive, whatever the plans 
made by day, as to read for an hour huddled in all spare clothing, then 
to throw open the windows and dive under as many blankets as a 
Minnesota farmer in January. The bogotano does not, of course, 
believe in open windows. Though he scorns a fire — or has never 
thought to build one — he has a quaking fear of the night air, against 
which he charges a score of diseases headed by the dreaded pneu- 
monia of high altitudes. Those who venture out at night habitually 
hold a handkerchief over mouth and nostrils. Yet at least this can 
be said, that nowhere is sleep, if properly tucked in, more sound and 
refreshing. 

Within a week we found ourselves acclimated — or should I say 
altitudinated — and took to exploring the city more thoroughly. The 
air was still noticeably thin, but there was enough of it to furnish the 
lung-fuel even for the five mile stroll up to the natural stone gate- 
way where the highway to the east clambers away through a notch 

25 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

and begins the descent to Venezuela. Looking down upon it from 
here, the misinformed traveler might easily fancy the broad sabana 
the sea-level plains of some northern clime, never guessing that forty 
miles to the west the world falls abruptly away into the torrid zone. 
For Bogota is chiefly remarkable for its location. Taken somewhere 
else it would be like many another city of Spanish ancestry. Its 
streets are singularly alike, wide, straight, a few paved in macadam, 
more in rough cobbles, many grass-grown and all with a central line 
of flagstones worn smooth by the feet of generations of carriers. The 
chiefly two-story houses toe sidewalks so narrow that two can seldom 
pass abreast, and for those who know Spain or her former colonies 
there is nothing unusual in the architecture. The streets cross each 
other at solemn right angles, and those which do not fade away on 
the plain fetch sharply up against the rusty black range that backs 
the city. The system of street numbering is excellent, that of the 
houses clumsy, and the former is marred by the habit of the volatile 
government in changing familiar names as often as some new or for- 
gotten patriot is called to its attention. Thus the Plaza San Augustin 
had been the Plaza Ayacucho up to a short time before our arrival, 
yet before we left it had become the Plaza Sucre in honor of a new 
statue of that general unveiled on Colombia's Independence Day, July 
twentieth. In like manner the Plaza de Egipto was transformed 
before our very eyes into the Plaza de Maza. This weakness for 
honoring new heroes is characteristic of the whole country. Not only 
are its provinces frequently renamed, but in the short century since 
its independence, the nation itself has basked under a half dozen 
titles, — to wit : " La Gran Colombia " ; " Nueva Granada " ; " Con- 
federation Granadina " ; " Estados Unidos de Nueva Granada " ; " Es- 
tados Unidos de Colombia"; and, since 1885, " Republica de Colom- 
bia " — and there are evidences that it is not yet entirely satisfied. 

It is less in its material aspects than in the ways of its population 
that the traveler finds Bogota interesting. About every inhabitant 
hovers a glamour of romance. Either he has always lived in this 
miniature world, or he has at least once made the laborious journey 
up to it. The vast majority are born, live, and die here in their lofty 
isolation. Shut away by weeks of wilderness from the outside world, 
alone with its own little trials and triumphs, it seems something long 
ago left behind up here under the chilly stars by a receding wave of 
civilization. Small wonder its people consider their city the center 
of the universe. Those who travel a little way out into the world 

26 



THE CLOISTERED CITY 

see nothing to compare with it; the scant minority that reach Paris 
are credited with fervid imaginations, if indeed the picture of what 
they have seen is not effaced during the long toilsome journey back 
to their own beloved capital. Perhaps no other city of to-day is more 
nearly what a newly discovered one must have been to the happy 
explorers of earlier times. Now and then there comes upon the 
traveler the regret that it is not entirely cut off instead of nine-tenths 
so. A region fitted for the development of its own customs, had it 
been left to its aboriginal Chibchas it might have evolved a civiliza- 
tion entirely its own, altogether different, and not this rather crumpled 
copy of familiar world capitals. 

Bogota is decidedly a white man's city. Indeed there is hardly 
another of its size south of the Canadian border in which the per- 
centage of pure white complexions is higher. On rare occasions a 
negro who had drifted up from the hot lands below sat huddled in 
the main plaza in all the blankets and ruanas he could borrow, but 
his face was sure soon to be numbered among the missing. Brunettes 
predominate, of course, but blonds are by no means rare. The boot- 
black who served us now and then was a decided towhead. Red 
cheeks are almost the rule. Slight atmospheric pressure, bringing the 
blood nearer the surface, no doubt largely accounts for this, but there 
are many other evidences of general good health. At this altitude 
the violation of most of the rules of sanitation are lightly punished. 
The temperature, cold enough to be invigorating yet not so cold as to 
require our health-menacing artificial heat, combined with its simple, 
placid life, makes Bogota a town of plump, robust figures, particularly 
among the women, unmarked by the dissipation common to the males. 
Many of the former may frankly be termed beautiful, in spite of a 
wide-spread tendency of the sex to wear distinctly noticeable black 
mustaches. Unfortunately the men of the well-to-do class are not 
believers in exercise, or the systematic caring for the body. Scorn- 
ing every unnecessary physical exertion, letting themselves grow up 
haphazard, they are noticeably round-shouldered and hollow-chested. 
An American long resident in the city seriously advised us to " get a 
hump into your shoulders so you won't attract so much attention." 

Even the descendants of the Chibchas, that make up much of the 
population of the outskirts and the surrounding country, have a tinge 
of russet in their cheeks, and are by no means so dark as our copper- 
skinned aborigines. Daily they swarm into the city that was once 
theirs. Short, yet sturdy, muscular carriers and arrieros, as often 

27 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

female as male, pass noiselessly through the streets with the produce 
of their country patches. Girls barely ten, to old women, many of 
comely features in spite of the encrusted dirt of years, more often 
so brutalized by toil as to seem hardly human, dressed in matted 
rags, their feet and legs bare almost to the knees, plod past under 
burdens an American workman could not carry a hundred yards. 
Early in the wintry plateau mornings they set out from their chozas, 
cobblestone or mud hovels thatched with the tough yellow-brown 
grass of the uplands, that are huddled in the mountain passes or 
strewn out along the windswept sabana, driving a bull — rarely a 
steer, since the former animal loses much of his belligerency at this 
altitude — on its back a load little larger than that which the female 
driver, with a strap about her brow, carries herself. They are all but 
indistinguishable from the men who tramp beside them. A patch- 
work skirt instead of tattered trousers is almost the only difference 
in dress, and their manner is utterly devoid of any feminine touch. 
Brawny as the men, they march through all the hardships of life as 
sturdily and uncomplainingly as our early pioneers, asking sympathy 
neither by word nor look. It is a commonplace sight in Bogota to 
see a mere girl in years grasp the nosering rope of a bull and throw 
him to his knees, or lay hold of a cinch-strap in her calloused hands 
and, with one foot against the animal's ribs, tighten the girth with 
the skill of an experienced arriero. Girls and boys alike are trained 
from their earliest years to this life of bovine toil, never looking 
forward to any other. Of the existence of schools they have hardly 
an inkling. To them life is bounded by their cheerless hovels and the 
chicherias of the city, numerous as the pulquerias of Mexico. In 
every corner of the capital these low drinking shops abound, mas- 
querading under such misnomers as " El Nido de Amor " — " The 
Love Nest," — and overrun by their besotted votaries of both sexes. 
Yet the bogotano Indian drunk is quiet and peaceful compared with 
the Mexican, for chicha seems chiefly to bring drowsiness and con- 
tentment with life as it is. 

Ever since our arrival Hays and I had been threatening to patronize 
one of the two public bath houses with a first-class bogotano repu- 
tation rumor had it existed in the capital. But in a land where the 
temperature rarely reaches fifty, and the floors are tiled, it takes 
courage, and we had been satisfying ourselves and our duty to 
humanity by bravely splashing a basin of icy water over our manly 
forms each morning on arising. By dint of strong resolutions often 

28 




nd its sabana from the summit of Guadalupe 




The central plaza of Bogota from the window of our room. In the center is the famous statue of Bolivar by Tenarani; on the right, the new capilolio; in the middle foreground the Cathedral, backed by the peaks of Guadalupe and Monserrate 



THE CLOISTERED CITY 

repeated to be up at six and visit one of the casas de bafios, we did 
finally manage one morning to find ourselves wandering the streets 
by eight, with towel and soap under our arms, and stared at by all 
we met. We discovered " La Violeta " at last, next door to a black- 
smith shop. The keeper we woke up told us we might have a cold 
bath, but that the sign on the front wall: "Hot Baths at all Hours," 
was to be taken with a bogotano meaning. 

A few mornings later we did actually find the other establishment 
open. We entered a large patio, the most striking of several build- 
ings within which was a round, or, more exactly, an eight-sided 
house, and in time succeeded in arousing the place to the extent of 
bringing down upon us a youth hugely excited at the appearance of 
a crowd of two whole bathers all at one time. It turned out that 
each of the eight sides of the strange building was — theoretically — 
a bathroom of the shape of a slice of cake, with a frigid tile floor 
and an aged porcelain tub in which a bath cost only $10. At the 
back was a larger, though none the less dreary, chamber with a 
regadera, or showerbath. The youth assured us there was plenty of 
hot water. I won the toss and was soon stripped. But the shower 
was colder than the ice-fields bounding the pole. When I had caught 
my breath I bawled my repertory of profane Spanish at the youth, 
who could be seen through a hole above pottering with some sort of 
upright boiler and firebox and now and then peering down upon me. 
Suddenly the water grew warm, hot, boiling, then, just when I had 
soaped myself from crown to toe in the steam, it turned as suddenly 
cold again, and an instant later stopped entirely. My eyes tight 
closed, I shouted at the youth above. 

" Es que el agua caliente se acabo," he droned. " It is that the hot 
water has finished itself." 

There being no deadly weapon at hand, I turned on a tap of ice- 
cold water and raced to the dressing-room still half soaped. Hays, 
scantily clad, was gazing fiercely at the youth through a hole in the 
door. 

" Then there is n't any more hot water ? " he demanded. 

" Not now, sefior, but there will be soon." 

" Good. How soon ? " 

" Early to-morrow morning, sefior." 

" But I want to bathe now ! " 

" Ah, you want to bathe ? " repeated the youth, with wide-open 
eyes. 

29 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

" No, you cross-eyed Son of Spigdom," exploded the ordinarily 
even-tempered ex-corporal, " I came here and stripped to an under- 
shirt that I might dance in my bare feet on this tile floor in honor of 
Jose Maria de la Santa Trindidad Simon Bolivar! Get up on that 
roof and fire up or . . ." 

The youth was already feverishly stoking armsful of wood under 
the upright boiler, and by the time I left for home Hays was shadow 
boxing to keep warm, with a fair chance of getting a bath before the 
day was done. 

As is to be expected from its isolation, the Colombian capital is a 
deeply religious, not to say a fanatical, city. An infernal din of 
church bells of the tone of suspended pans or broken boilers makes 
the early morning hours hideous and continues at frequent intervals 
throughout the day. Here, contrary to the custom in most centers of 
the Latin race, the men as well as the women go to church. College 
professors and literary lights of no mean ability seriously contend 
that the shinbone of some saint in this shrine or that " temple " has 
miraculous power; but the superstition of isolation hangs particularly 
heavy over the uneducated masses. Of late years the Liberals and 
the Masons have grown nearly as powerful as the Conservatives, and 
do not hesitate to express themselves freely in public, knowing that 
in case of attack any representative body of the population includes 
fellow-Liberals who will come to their rescue. Every public gather- 
ing is pregnant with possibilities of an outburst between the two 
divisions of society. The very schoolboys talk politics — here in- 
extricably entangled with religion — and the foreigner who wishes 
to hold the attention of a Colombian for a conversation of any length 
must have some knowledge, or at least a plausible pretense of knowl- 
edge, of interior political questions. It was a bare three years since 
a Protestant missionary had been stoned by the populace of Bogota, 
though he now held his services in peace in what, despite the lack of 
outward signs, was really a church. Policemen armed with rifles 
liberally besprinkle every meeting in theater, cathedral, or public 
square. Shortly before our arrival a dozen officers and citizens had 
been killed in a religious riot in the bullring. 

Were they less hump-shouldered, these policemen of Bogota might 
easily be taken for Irishmen, and an absent-minded American fancy 
himself back in the New York of a decade ago. The uniform of the 
day force is a copy of that of our own metropolis before the helmets 
were abolished. At night the scene changes. In every street spring 

30 



THE CLOISTERED CITY 

up officers in high caps and long capes who might have stepped directly 
from the arrondissements of Paris, with even the short sword in 
place of the daytime " night-stick." They are a well disciplined body 
of men, quite unlike the childish, inefficient guardians of law and dis- 
order so familiar from the Rio Grande southward. The bogotano 
officer would no sooner be seen sitting, lounging, or smoking on duty 
than would one in our own large cities. As in all Latin-American 
countries, however, the chief drawback to a really efficient service is 
the caste system. The policemen are of necessity recruited from the 
gente del pueblo, and though they have no hesitancy in arresting one 
of their own class, the sight of a white collar paralyzes them with 
their ingrown deference to the more powerful rank of society. The 
result is that a well-dressed person can commit anything short of 
serious crime under the very eyes of the police. The officer may 
keep the culprit under surveillance, but rarely summons up courage 
actually to arrest him until he has definite orders from a white-collared 
superior. 

There are curious local customs in Bogota. Her small shops, for 
example, have a system of signs intelligible only to the initiated. A 
red flag announces meat for sale ; a red flag with a yellow star, meat 
and bones; a white flag, milk; a green one, vegetables and grains. 
A cabbage or a lettuce-head thrust forth on the end of a stick marks 
the entrance to a cheap restaurant ; a tuft of faded flowers, a chicheria. 
The bogotano sees nothing incongruous in a building that announces 
itself a " Primary School " above and an " American Bar " below. 
On week days the pedestrian slinks through many of the chief resi- 
dential streets apparently unseen; on a gala Sunday afternoon the 
same stroll is to run an unbroken gauntlet of feminine eyes. For then 
the sefioritas who are seen, if at all, during the week, hurrying to 
mass all but concealed in their mantos, don their most resplendent 
garb and, with cushions under their plump elbows, lean in their 
window embrazures oggling and being oggled through the iron rejas. 

A native of Medellin, where envy of the capital and her self-seeking 
politicians is rife, had assured us as far away as Panama : 

" All they do in Bogota is study and steal." 

We had only to glance out our windows to find basis for the first 
part of the assertion. The plaza below was always alive with students 
from the local institutions of higher learning for males marching 
slowly back and forth conning the day's lessons. The fireless houses 
are cold and dungeon-like, particularly in the morning, and the city 

31 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

long ago formed the habit of studying afoot. The racial dislike of 
solitude and the eagerness to be seen and recognized by their fellows 
as devotees of learning may also have some part in a practice that 
many a bogotano continues through life. It is commonplace to pass 
in almost any street men even past middle age strolling along with 
an open book in one hand and the inevitable silver-headed cane in the 
other. 

In colonial times Bogota won the reputation, if not the actual posi- 
tion, of " literary capital of South America." Her speech is still 
the best Castilian of America, with little of that slovenliness of pro- 
nunciation so general from the Rio Grande southward. To this day 
the city has a considerable intellectual life, wider perhaps than it is 
deep. " Everyone " writes. He is a rare public man who has not 
published at least a handful of " versos " in his youth. Poets, writers, 
painters, and musical composers are more numerous than in many a 
far larger center of civilization. The placid isolation of life in 
Bogota, almost completely severed from the feverish distractions of 
the modern world, makes this natural. There is nothing else to do. 
Then, too, lack of opportunity to compare their work with that of a 
wider world no doubt gives the " literatos " of Bogota a self-com- 
placency that might otherwise be slighter. The cheap local printing- 
presses pour out a constant flood of five-cent volumes of the local 
" poets," those same " cachacos " and " filipichines " in frock-tailed 
coats who lean with such Parisian grace on their canes at the prin- 
cipal street corners. The youth who sees his smudged likeness appear 
on the tissue-paper cover of the weekly pamphlet seethes with ill- 
suppressed joy at his entrance into the glorious, if crowded, ranks 
of the " intelectuales." It is chiefly a dilettante literature, rarely of 
material reward and of no visible connection with life. But a con- 
siderable stream of flowery verse, languidly melancholy in its tem- 
perament and not overburdened with deep thought, flows constantly, 
and the boiling down by time has left Bogota credited with a few 
works of genuine worth. 

A lecture was given one evening at the Jurisprudence Club on the 
momentuous subject of " The Necessity of a Legal Revolution in 
Colombia." Hays renigged at the last moment, but I accepted the 
invitation issued to the " general public." I was the only foreigner 
among the hundred present, yet no American audience could have 
been more universally white of complexion. Indeed, the gathering 
was strikingly like a similar one in our own country — on a March 

32 




2,w 



3 H 




THE CLOISTERED CITY 

evening when the furnace had broken down or the janitor gone on 
strike. All wore overcoats and kept constantly bundled up. The 
solemn whispering of the audience as it gathered, the unattractiveness 
of the women, all of whom had long since left youth behind, the staid 
mien of the men in their frock coats, gave the scene the atmosphere 
of a meeting of " highbrows " in a corner of far-away New England. 
But there was superimposed a pompous solemnity and a funereal tone 
peculiar to the Latin-American, to a race that lays more stress on 
the correctness of its manner than the weight of its matter. A mis- 
statement or a palpably erroneous fact or conclusion, one felt, might 
pass muster, but not a slip in the " urbanities " of society or the in- 
correct knotting of a cravat. 

It was a " lecture " in the French sense. When the president had 
taken his place and all was arranged in faultless Parisian order, the 
speaker removed his neck-scarf and began solemnly to read from type- 
written manuscript. He was a man of forty, wearing glasses, with 
the perpendicular wrinkles of close study on his brow. A score of 
countries could have reproduced him ad libitum. He read drearily, 
monotonously, with constant care never to spill over into the merely 
human. The discourse based itself on the narrow national patriotism 
common to Latin-America. Yet at times the speaker talked plainly, 
admitting that Colombia is 88% illiterate and that half the remainder 
can barely read and write. The Church he assailed bitterly for its 
shortcomings, yet never mentioned it directly. In time, as is bound 
to happen sooner or later in any public meeting in Colombia, he 
drifted into the great national grievance and whined through several 
pages on " the wickedness of taking the rebel province of Panama 
away from us, a weak and helpless people " — here I caught several 
of the audience gazing fixedly at me, as if they fancied I had taken 
some active part in that debateable action. Through all the latter 
part of the lecture the church bells across the way kept up a constant 
jangling that completely swallowed up whatever conclusions he had 
gained from his laborious dissertation. It was strangely as if the voice 
of religion and superstition were trying by din and hubbub to drown 
out that of reason and reflection, as it has since the first medicine-man 
danced howling into the circle of elders in conference in the Stone 
Age. 

On the " Panama question " the attitude of the Colombian man in 
the street is not exactly that of the Government. A well-educated 
native holding a small post, though clinging to the same convictions 

33 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

on the " taking " of the " rebel province " as the bulk of his country- 
men, expressed himself to me as follows: 

" We ordinary citizens feel that our country should be paid for the 
loss of Panama, and the slight to our national honor. But we hope 
very much that your United States will not pay our government a 
large sum of money in cash, as contemplated by the proposed treaty. 
For almost all of it would go into the pockets of the dozen poli- 
ticians who hold the reins of government. Give us obras hechas, — 
finished works, — a railway from the coast to Bogota, or a perfected 
harbor with docks and modern facilities." 

One day soon after our arrival we strolled over to the Biblioteca 
Nacional to begin the Colombian reading we had planned. It was 
wasted effort. We brought up against a heavy colonial door bearing 
the announcement : " Suspended until further notice, by order of the 
Ministry of Public Instruction." 

An American resident interpreted it to mean, " Oh, some of the 
readers have been stealing books again " — and we recalled the cynical 
native of Medellin. Days later, however, when we gained unofficial 
admission for a few moments, we found that the 5000 volumes be- 
queathed by a Colombian " literato " not unknown to a wider world 
— Rafael Pombo, who had recently died in Paris — were being 
catalogued. Several frock-coated pedants were smoking innumerable 
cigarettes and deceiving themselves into the notion that they were at 
work arranging the books. But the National Library remained her- 
metically sealed to the public as long as we remained in the capital. 
It was by no means the first nor the last time we met a similar disap- 
pointment in South America. 

We had put it off a long while before we gathered courage and all 
our woolen garments and hurried through the wintry night to Bogota's 
main theater. As in other restricted societies, entertainments are 
frequently " got up " here, chiefly with local talent. It is a long way 
to any other talent in Bogota. This one was a velada in honor of 
that same Rafael Pombo. Fortunately the audience was large 
enough to keep the place moderately warm. Every detail, every 
movement, the very toilettes of the distinctly good looking, if mus- 
tached, ladies in boxes and stalls were as exact a copy as was humanly 
possible of similar scenes at the opera in Paris, a copy in miniature 
bearing the earmarks of having been taken from some novel of the 
boulevards. Sefiora la bogotana used her lorgnette exactly as she 
had read of her Parisian counterpart doing; the men, in faultless 

34 



THE CLOISTERED CITY 

evening dress down to the last white eyeglass ribbon about the neck, 
strove to act precisely as they conceived men did on like occasions 
in the wider world. Again all was burdened by the solemn artifici- 
ality of the race. One after another six men burst genteelly upon 
the stage and declaimed something or other in that painful, flamboyant 
ranting so beloved of the Latin. All the cut and dried forms of 
" cultured " society were solemnly carried out. Flowers, some one 
had read, were always presented to the performers, and even the 
podgy, pompous old fellow who forgot his " piece " several times had 
solemnly thrust upon him by a stage lackey in gorgeous livery two 
immense wreaths of blossoms. 

In one matter at least these bogotanos were at an advantage over 
amateurs of other lands. Natural declaimers and reciters from baby- 
hood, their tongues always eager for utterance, almost devoid of that 
bashfulness that works the undoing of the less fluent but perhaps 
deeper thinking races, they seemed seasoned actors in those points 
which called for strictly histrionic ability. In another theater a few 
nights later we saw several Spanish comedies presented by a company 
of local amateurs, and were astonished at the excellence of the work. 
That of a few of the principals would have won praise on any stage. 

Three railways leave Bogota, though none of them gets very far 
away. First in importance, of course, is that to Facatativa, connect- 
ing with Jirardot. Another runs through the flower-decked suburb 
of Chapinero, past Caro, with its cream-colored castle on a hill above 
a cluster of thatched mud huts, to Nemecon, a sooty adobe town of 
surface coal mines where the sabana is cut off on the north. Back 
along it to Zapiquira the excursionist tramps ten miles in autumn 
coolness, hardly realizing he is near the equator, between fields of half- 
grown maize, broad grassy pastures dotted with white clover, with 
dandelions, daisies, cowslips, and brilliant yellow " smart-weed/' 
Blackberry bushes here and there edge a field in which scamper plump 
cattle and horses ; others are confined by fence posts of stone with 
four holes carefully drilled in each through which to pass the alambre 
de puas, — barbed wire from our own land. Zapiquira is remarkable 
only for the bulking hill beside it, almost solid rock salt. The mouths 
of a score of small tunnels lie in plain sight somewhat up the slope. 
The salt rocks are beaten fine, dissolved in water, evaporated, pressed, 
and packed into two-bushel bags that are carried away by toil-stupefied 
women and girls with a band across their foreheads. 

But the excursion par excellence is that to the falls of Tequendama, 

35 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the theme of at least one poem by every bogotano writer. The unholy 
clatter of church-bells helped me arouse Hays one morning in time 
to catch the early train on the " Ferrocarril del Sur." Some twenty 
miles out we descended at the isolated little station of Tequendama 
and struck off through a region wholly unwooded and almost desert 
dry. As the road mounted a bit from the bare sabana a hardy vege- 
tation appeared, here and there a small grove of eucalypti, and a 
bushy natural growth thinly covering the sides of the low mountains 
among which we were soon winding. Before long we fell in with 
the narrow Bogota river, idling placidly along, little guessing what a 
tremendous tumble it was due to get a bit later. Tradition has it 
that a god or an Inca, desiring to drain the lake that once covered 
the sabana, opened the gap through which the stream drops. By and 
by there appeared ahead a whirling mist cloud which grew until we 
found ourselves completely enveloped in a great fog out of which 
rose a dull, never-ending roar of indistinct location. Directed by a 
peasant, we descended through a rustic gate and for some yards down 
a field of heather and deep-green grass speckled with white clover 
blossoms and scattered with massive protruding rocks. The face of 
the one of these a Bogota merchant had disfigured in impertinent 
American fashion with an advertisement of his " superior coffee." 
We had reached the " Niagara of Colombia." 

Yet so far as seeing went we might as well have been in our cozy 
beds back in the capital. An ordinary brown stream some forty feet 
wide flowed down through bulging rocks, pitched over in a short fall 
on to a stony ledge at our feet, then off into flhe mist-blinded unknown. 
A mere country brook in which we could dip our fingers here, a foot 
beyond it was forever gone. It was as if a whole world of mystery 
lay below and about us, yet the curtain of swirling gray mist into 
which the river plunged to be seen no more hid all from view. 

We had shivered through our lunch, finding it difficult to believe 
that we were five degrees from the equator in the month of July, 
when suddenly the wind rose, and for a moment the mist thinned 
until we caught a hint of an immense chasm untold depths below; 
then closed in again. The excursion seemed to have been a failure. 
We strolled on down the highway in the fog and loafed awhile on a 
bushy hillside. But as we turned homeward, the mist was .viped away 
as suddenly as a curtain drawn aside and all Tequendama lay before 
us. I slid down a steep bank to the edge of the bottomless chasm 
and sat down where I could remain, as long as I kept my feet braced 

36 




Celebrating Colombia's Independence Day (July 20th) by unveiling a new statue of Sucre 
and renaming a plaza in his honor 




Meanwhile in another square the populace marvels at the feats of "marorna nacional' 
an amateur circus. Note the line of policemen in holiday attire 



of 



THE CLOISTERED CITY 

in the sod, before one of the finest sights in the world — or let them 
slip and drop to sudden death. From the upper ledge the stream fell 
a sheer unbroken thousand feet in which the entire river seemed to 
turn to spray and whatever was left when it struck was beaten into 
mist which, rising like steam from the yawning gorge as from some 
immense caldron, hid all the face of the adjacent country. Im- 
measurely below, a much smaller stream could be seen picking itself 
together again and winding its way dizzily off through a vast rock- 
faced canon on the perpendicular walls of which clung a few hardy 
plants; and while we remained in the cold autumn world above, the 
river flowed away into the tropics, into the coffee country, the land 
of bananas, and the perpetual summer of the Magdalena, to help 
float Colombia down to the outer world. 

Of the many views of Bogota the best is that we had at the end of 
our stay, from the summit of Guadalupe. A bit of the backing range 
juts forth in two peaks, each with a little white church on its top, 
that seem almost sheer above the city. We climbed to the higher in 
something more than an hour, massed clouds breaking away now and 
then to flood with sunshine the ever widening sabana and the hazy, 
far-away mountains that seemed to cut off the world completely, and 
came out at last on a grassy platform where we could look down, 
like the astonished Conquistadores, on all the vast plain, and, unlike 
them, on the city they founded. North and south, as far as we could 
see, stretched the bleak, treeless range on which we stood. At our 
feet this fell abruptly away to the suburban huts of the city and her 
encircling Paseo de Bolivar. Every plaza and patio, many green with 
a clump of eucalypti, every window and rooftile, was plainly visible. 
The people were so tiny we had to look for them carefully, as for 
insects on a carpet, before we could make them out by hundreds 
crawling along the light-brown streets and specking the squares. Near 
the brick-walled cemetery the disk of the bullring, filled now with the 
tents of the " Circo Keller," seemed a canvas cover on a small squat 
pail. Factories, as we understand the word, being unknown, not a 
fleck of smoke smudged the dull-red expanse of the stoveless city. Its 
noises came up to us very faintly, at times borne wholly away on 
the wind, and from this height even the diabolic din of church-bells 
sounded soft and almost musical. 

A recent census sets the population at 122,000. Looking down 
upon the tity from Guadalupe, this seems at first an underestimation. 
But gradually one realizes that not only are its houses low, often of 

37 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

a single story, but largely taken up by interior patios. Then there 
are more than a score of churches, innumerable chapels, eight large 
monasteries, several seminaries, and many residences of the Church 
authorities. Add to this the many government buildings, and bit by 
bit the traveler grown skeptical from experience with Latin-American 
figures, begins to wonder if these are not inflated. There is not a 
wooden building in town. Treelessness governs the architecture, for 
the surrounding country is above the timber line, though the imported 
eucalyptus rises in groves here and there and flanks roads and rail- 
ways. 

A distinct line divides the city from the sabana, spread out like 
a rich brown carpet, cut up into irregular fields by adobe wall-fences 
often roofed, like the houses, with aged red tiles. In many places 
the sheen of shallow lakes recalled that the Zipa of the Chibchas 
built his Teusaquilla here on the lower skirts of the range to escape 
the winter floods of the plain. Off across it were dimly seen several 
flat towns, and here and there a farm-house or a cluster of them in 
a grove of the slender Australian gum-trees which merely accen- 
tuated the treelessness of the vast expanse of World. Six highways 
sally forth from the city, to march waveringly across the plain, mere 
threads lost at last in the enclosing range, broken, gnarled, pitched 
and tumbled into every manner of shape, bright peaks and valleys 
standing sharply forth where the sun strikes, great purple-black 
patches marking the shadows of the clouds. Beyond all else, at times 
lost in clouds, at others plainly visible, lay the central range of the 
Cordillera over which we must pass on our journey southward. 
Though more than a hundred miles away, it bulked into the sky like 
some vast supernatural wall, the broad snow-capped cone of Tolima 
piercing the heavens in the center of the picture. 



38 



CHAPTER III 

FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

THE people of Bogota refused to take seriously our plan of 
walking to Quito. It was not merely that the Ecuadorian 
capital was far away; to the inhabitants of this isolated 
little world it was only a name, like Moscow or Lhassa. Those who 
had gone to school as far as the geography lessons had a nebulous 
notion that it lay somewhere to the south, and that no sea intervened ; 
but their imaginations could not picture two lone gringos arriving by 
land. To seek information was simply to waste time. The non- 
existent cannot be described. The best we could do was to pore over 
a page map in a foreign atlas, whereon a match, according to scale, 
was 300 miles long. Quito lay nearly three match-lengths distant 
" as the crow flies," without considering the very mountainous nature 
of the country between. Yet the hardy Conquistadores had somehow 
journeyed thither, and in other parts of the world we had both 
traveled routes that the natives considered " impossible." 

As far away as Panama the horrors of this proposed tramp had 
been impressed upon me. At dinner one evening a typical, stage 
Englishman, accent and all, and an incurable monopolist of the con- 
versation, proved to be the owner of mines in Colombia, and I man- 
aged once to cut in with a query about travel in that country. 

" When the steamer lands you in ," he began, " you buy your 

mules, ten or twelve, hire your mozos and carriers and . . ." 

" But I plan to walk." 

" Walk ! " exploded my fellow-guest, " Why on earth should a man 
wish to walk?" 

" It keeps the girth reduced," I might have replied. 

11 It cahn't be done," dogmatized the monopolist. " Absurd ! Why 
— why — a man cahn't travel on foot in Colombia. His social stand- 
ing depends on how fine a mule he rides. If he walked, he 'd be taken 
for a bally peon, lose his caste entirely, y' know, and all that sort of 
thing." 

"Horrible!" I gasped. 

39 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

" Besides, you 've got to have a mule-train to carry your tent and 
bed and supplies and . . . Why, what on earth would you eat?" 

" Huts ..." I began. 

"Eh? Of the natives? Of course, but they haven't a blessed 
thing to eat, y' know. They live on corn cakes and beans, and 
bananas and bread, and that sort of thing. Now and then a chicken 
perhaps, but you M starve to death. And if they saw a white man 
coming, they 'd know he had a lot of money and rob him. Bandits 
and that sort of thing, y' know. And how are you going to cross 
the rivers — ? " 

" Swim — " I tried to say, but the sentence was drowned in his 
cataract of words. 

" And the mud ! Why, bless me, one time a party was going along 
the road in Colombia and they saw a hat, an English hat, lying in a 
mudhole. One of them started to kick it, when a man's voice shouted : 

" * 'Ere, stop it ! That 's my bally 'ead ! ' 

" ' What on earth are you doing down there ? ' said the party. 

" ' Sitting on my mule, to be sure/ said the voice. 

" Why, bless me, I would n't go on foot in Colombia for all the gold 
in the bank of England ! " 

It was the end of July when I tiptoed out of the American Legation 
of Bogota, bearing at last a letter from our magnificent charge 
d'affaires — a splendid representative of Harvard, but not, thank God, 
of the United States — and carried it over to the government build- 
ing opposite. The Minister of Foreign Affairs to whom I made my 
way through a line of typewriters on which cigarette-clouded officials 
were pounding out great international matters with two fingers, was 
one of those rare persons who know why a man should wish to walk, 
though, being a Colombian, he had never dared do so himself, and 
was, moreover, certain that Quito could not be reached by land. I 
was soon armed with a gorgeous, if misspelled, document in which 
the Government of Colombia permitted itself to recommend los 
sefiores americanos therein named to the authorities along the way — 
should any such turn up. 

The genuine traveler sets out on a journey by tossing a toothbrush 
into a pocket and strolling out of town. But even Hays had suffered 
somewhat from that softening of the vagabond's moral fiber that is the 
penalty for dallying with the bourgeois comforts of civilization. We 
both had the American hobo's disgust for the " blanket stiff " who 
" packs " his own bed ; yet the Andes offer no proper field for ortho- 

40 



'nh 



FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

dox hoboing. The journey of unknown duration and possibilities 
before us was sure to have variations in climate making extra clothing 
indispensable; moreover, we could not take the photographs along 
the way unless we carried with us means for developing the nega- 
tives. Our first plan was to buy a donkey and drive him between 
us down the crest of the Andes. Among the many reasons why this 
fond dream could not be realized was the certainty that we should 
have chased the animal off his feet within a week. Observation and 
reflection suggested that we should do better to follow the ways of 
the country and hire a human beast of burden. For one thing, if 
the latter ran away or dropped dead we lost nothing, except perhaps 
our tempers ; if the donkey came to a like end, we would be out ten 
or twelve dollars. Hays abandoned the plan with double regret, for 
with it went the hope of some day reporting the journey under the 
arresting title, " Three Uncurried Asses in the Andes." 

With hundreds of animated bundles of rags trotting about the city 
ready to lug anything from a load of hay to a chest of drawers for a 
mere five-cent piece, we were certain there would be scores of native 
carriers eager to see the world and to substitute a dismal and inter- 
mittent hand-to-mouth existence for a steady job. We quickly dis- 
covered, however, that we were wrong in ascribing our own tem- 
peraments to the Chibcha Indian. There was not a youth among the 
swarming cargadores of Bogota who had the faintest desire to see 
the world ; the bare thought of getting out of sound of the clanging 
cathedral bells filled them one and all with terror. For the first time 
we had struck the basic economic fact that the South American 
aboriginal prefers to starve at home rather than to live in comparative 
opulence elsewhere. In prehistoric times the Indians worshipped the 
natural phenomena about their place of birth ; each village had its cave 
or tree, its stone or hill, on which it depended for protection ; and the 
dread of getting out of reach of these still courses through their primi- 
tive minds. 

By dint of repeated packing and throwing away, we reduced our 
fundamental necessities to little more than the contents of two swollen 
suitcases. Word of our nefarious project to contract a carrier to 
bear these to some far-off, unknown world reached the last hovels 
of the suburbs. But the cargadores we approached quickly named 
an exorbitant wage and fled at the first opportunity. It was not a 
question of load, but of road. Hays inticed a sturdy fellow upstairs 
one day and pointed out our baggage on top of an enormous chest. 

41 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

The Indian calmly picked up chest and all, murmuring cheerfully: 

" A little heavy, seiiores, but I can do it. Where to ? " 

When we suggested a long trip, however, horror crept into his 
eyes, though his unemotional Indian face showed none of it, and 
naming an impossible fee, he slowly and silently slid backward through 
the door. 

To our surprise, a man captured late on the day before we planned 
to start did not show this customary fear. He proved to be a native 
of the tierra caliente, eager to get back to his tropical home, and 
asserted his ability to carry four arrobas (ioo pounds) day after day. 
Our baggage weighed far less than that. 

" Why not take a contract to go with us by the month ? " I sug- 
gested. 

" Como que pagaran los seiiores ? " he queried reflectively. 

" We '11 pay you," I answered, setting the sum high so that Hays, 
to whom money was always a minor detail, could not charge me 
with losing this eleventh-hour opportunity, $1200 a month, and 
food." 

We could see that he " fell for it " at once, and was merely pro- 
crastinating in the hope of getting more. That dream vanished, he 
announced that he must have a new hat and ruana for " so important 
a journey." We agreed to supply these — when he turned up at six 
in the morning ready to start. 

He did not turn up. When we had shivered into our clothes and 
gone to hang over our reja, cargadores male and female were already 
plentiful in the wintry, mist-draped plaza below, squatted inside their 
ruanas or wandering aimlessly about with a rope over one shoulder. 
Out of regard for the proprieties we beckoned to none but the men. 
It was some time before one — who, perhaps, had not yet heard our 
plans — appeared at the door. We were careful to mention only the 
first town, a short day's journey away, and offered fifty cents, at least 
twice what he averaged in daily earnings. Convinced we would give 
no more, he accepted. This time we took good care he should not 
escape. When he had bound the load with his rope — the cargador's 
one indispensable possession — we put him outside and went to 
breakfast. 

On our return we found him waiting — naturally. He prepared 
for the journey, not as we of the north would expect, by balancing the 
suitcases on opposite sides, but by slinging them both on his back, the 
rope cutting deeply into his shoulder, and set off bent so low, with 

42 



FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

the weight chiefly on his hips, that he seemed some deformed crea- 
ture shuffling along behind us. 

At last we were off, marching out of the main plaza of Bogota 
at eight on the morning of August first. In our flannel shirts, even 
with our coats still on, we set all the capital staring as we passed. 
Hays carried a kodak in one pocket and Ramsey's Spanish Grammar 
in the other ; my own apparatus and the overflow from my suitcase 
swung from a shoulder in a mochila, or woven hemp bag. Even our 
" One-Volume Library," consisting of a few favorite bits in a half- 
dozen languages bound into a single book, we had been forced to 
pack away on the carrier's back. We had exchanged instructions to 
cover any unexpected outcome of the journey, those which Hays 
had handed me consisting chiefly of the command, " In the event of 
death with boots on, do not remove the boots ! " The morning paper 
that overtook us near the statues of Colombus and Isabel announced 
that we had left for Quito the day before, but failed to specify on 
foot. Readers would have taken it for a printer's error, anyway. 

Hays volunteered to shadow the carrier for the first day. Both ex- 
perienced enough to know that the pleasure of traveling together is 
enhanced by traveling apart, we each set our own pace, letting our 
moods take color from the landscape, drifting together now and then 
when hungry for companionship, or often enough to assure ourselves 
of each other's welfare. Epictetus says, " As the bad singer cannot 
sing alone, but only in chorus, so a poor traveler cannot travel alone, 
but only in company." Hays, having a mind of his own to feed on, 
was by virtue thereof an excellent traveling companion. 

At first the way was lined with houses of sun-baked mud, and 
peopled by dull-eyed, respectful Indians and haughty horsemen. A 
bright sun, frequently clouded over, made it just the day for tramping 
in full garb. The Indian crawled along so slowly that I soon forged 
ahead. Beyond the outskirts the broad upland plain was cut into ir- 
regular fields by adobe walls or fences, often tile-roofed, with massive 
adobe gate pillars. Fields dense with green Indian corn alternated 
with yellow stretches of ripening grain. Here and there potatoes were 
being planted. Masses of big red roses, of geraniums and daisies and 
unfamiliar flowers, frequently beautified the scene. Two hours away 
I caught the last view of Bogota, backed by her black, mist-topped 
range ; then the cloistered city sank forever from our sight as the 
road dipped down from the slightest of knolls on the all but floor-flat 
plain. 

43 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

We had not set out to rival champion pedestrians. When appetite 
suggested, I stretched out at the roadside with my pocket lunch, read- 
ing Swinburne the while and scattering him page by page on the 
gusty winds of the sabana. Hays and our baggage drifted languidly 
past. All the day we followed a massive stone highway, built by the 
Spaniards of colonial times, now raised well above the flanking dirt 
roads preferred by the soft-footed travel of to-day. A large stone 
bridge of clumsy lines lifted us over the little Funza river which 
waters the sabana, and not far beyond we entered the ancient town of 
Mosquiera, on a main corner of which stood a statue of the Virgin, 
unusual only for the fact that she was jet-black of complexion as any 
African chief. To the South American the color line is not sharp, 
even in his picture of the after world. Some time later, having drifted 
together again, we met an ox-cart headed for Bogota. The half- 
Indian driver, struck suddenly wide-eyed at sight of our strange garb 
and the burdened carrier behind us, cried out in consternation : 

"Como! No hay mas funcion en Bogota?" 

We appreciated the implied compliment. He had mistaken us for 
performers in the " Keller Circus," a little fourth-rate affair playing 
in the capital. Having, no doubt, saved up his billetes for weeks and 
started for town at last with the price of admission to this wonderful 
" function," he was quite naturally dismayed to meet what seemed to 
be the show treking southward before he arrived. 

At three we strolled into Serrazuela, officially named Madrid. 
Hays' pedometer registered seventeen miles. In the little one-story 
" hotel," gaping with astonishment at our appearance, we were as- 
signed to a mat-carpeted room opening on the patio, and furnished 
with two wooden beds exactly five feet long, with very thin reed mat- 
tresses over the board flooring that took the place of springs. In 
this climate there was little gain in traveling leisurely and arriving 
early. Except for a few hours near noon, it was too cold to lounge 
along the way ; once arrived we could only wander aimlessly about 
among stupid villagers, uncommunicative as their baked-mud walls. 
By dark it had grown too wintry to sit reading with comfort, even had 
there been any other light than the pale flicker of a small candle. 
There was nothing left but to go to bed, and that had little of the 
pleasure the phrase suggests to American ears. When Hays set his 
feet against the footboard, his lips nearly reached his miniature pillow. 
He complained of feeling like the victim of a " trunk mystery." 
Sometime in the night I awoke to hear him growling, " No wonder 

44 




A section of the ancient highway, built by the Spaniards more than three centuries ago, 

leading from the sabana of Bogota down into the hotlands of the Magdalena. 

It was not designed for wheeled traffic, hence is laid in steps, 

with a slope to carry off the rains 




Fellow-travelers at the edge of the sabana of Bogota 



FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

these people are crooked!" My own was a folding bed — in that I 
had to fold up to get into it. 

Though we were afoot at chilly six, at nine we were still seeking a 
cargador. The one from Bogota had fled during the darkest hours. 
Moreover, he had evidently spread startling reports of our plans. In 
a town swarming with gaunt and ragged out-of-works we were a long 
time finding a man who admitted that he sometimes plied the voca- 
tion of carrier. His attitude was that of an heir to unlimited wealth 
whiling away the days until he came into his own by an occasional 
choice and easy task. After an endless oration in which he assured 
us times without number that he was " poor but honest," just the 
man required for our " very valuable baggage," which the " expensive 
leather boxes " proved it, and which in his hands would be perfectly 
safe among the robbers that swarmed in the road ahead — providing 
we walked close beside him — he admitted his willingness, as a special 
favor, to accompany us to La Mesa, eighteen miles away, for the 
paltry sum of $200. We offered fifty, and he left in well-feigned 
scorn. 

At the alcalde's office that official had been due only an hour or so, 
and naturally had not yet arrived. We spread our resplendent docu- 
ment before his hump-shouldered secretary, demanding a cargador at 
once. That 's the way the haughty traveler always did in the accounts 
we had read of journeys in the Andes. But Serrazuela was evidently 
ill-trained. The secretary stepped to the door and beckoned a few 
haughty rag-displays nearer, suggesting in a soft voice that perhaps, 
as a great favor to him personally, one of them would go with los 
senores and carry a " very light little bundlet." One by one they re- 
plied in as solemn tones as if they fancied we believed them, that they 
were already engaged for the day, that they had a lame knee, or a 
sore back, or an exacting spouse, or were in mourning for a mother's 
third cousin, and faded silently away. Among the last to go was our 
original " poor but honest " applicant, who paused to ask whether 
the offer we had made was $50 paper or $50 gold, because if we meant 
the latter he . . ." 

Just then the alcalde's perfume gladdened our nostrils, and one of 
the men, rounded up by a soldier, having accepted what was still an 
exorbitant day's wage, we were off at last. The day was bright and 
sunny. Behind, across the sabana, masses of white clouds hung over 
unseen Bogota and her distant black range. I could keep pace with 
" Rain in the Face," as Hays had dubbed our new acquisition, only by 

45 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

holding each foot a second or more before setting it down. If I 
paused to let him get a bit ahead, he was sure to wait for me a few 
yards beyond. Ten cents spent in a little wayside drunkery gave him 
new life, but only for a short half-hour. Once he fell in with a 
friend driving an " empty " donkey, and for a space we moved 
a little less slowly. Then the friend turned off toward his village and 
with a groan " Rain in the Face " took up his burden again and 
crawled snail-like behind me. 

Soon after we came to the edge of the world. The sabana had 
ended abruptly. Before us lay only a great swirling white mist into 
which disappeared the old Spanish highway that led in broad, low 
steps down and ever down into an unseen abyss. The carrier began 
to tremble visibly. The year before, he confided in a choked whisper, 
he had been held up here by bandits, who had killed and robbed his 
employer. Only when one of us went close in front and the other 
at his heels could he be induced to move forward and downward. 

Now and then a group of Indians, men and women as heavily bur- 
dened as their pack-animals, loomed forth from the clouds and toiled 
slowly upward past us. An hour down we came upon a rock grotto 
into which bareheaded arrieros were crawling with lighted candles. 

" It is," explained one of them, " that San Antonio once appeared 
here, and all caminantes stop to pray, because he aids, protects, and 
betters us." 

" Are you sure ? " I asked, curious to hear his answer. 

" Sure ? " he cried, staring at me with startled eyes, " Senor, I have 
been arriero on this road since I was a boy, always bringing a candle 
for San Antonio ; in all those years I have been robbed only three 
times — and then I had no money." 

He crossed himself thrice in the intricate South American manner 
and sped noiselessly away into the clouds after his animals. 

It may have been our failure to offer tribute to the saint of the 
grotto that all but brought our expedition to grief thus early. The 
mist had thinned and the landscape that opened out became more and 
more tropical. A single palm-tree, then clusters of them, grew up 
beside me. Banana plants and clumps of bamboo, like gigantic ferns, 
nodded sluggishly ; a spreading tree pink with blossoms added the 
needed touch of color. Suddenly I realized that my companions were 
not with me, and sat down to wait. A half-hour passed. I strolled 
back along the road, then hurried upward at sharper pace. Fully a 
mile up I sighted Hays, driving the wabbly-kneed Indian before him. 

46 



FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

They had already tiptoed on the edge of an adventure. Barely had I 
passed from view when there had fallen in with them, one by one, 
four evil-faced fellows carrying sugarcane staffs. As thirst came, 
each fell to peeling and munching his cane. Hays, lost in some prob- 
lem of Urdu philology, was suddenly recalled to the material world 
by a throat gurgle from " Rain in the Face." He looked up to find 
the four wayfarers, long sheath-knives in hand, still ostensibly engaged 
in peeling sugarcane, but closing in around him and the shivering 
cargador. Hays had taken for fiction the stories of dangers on the 
road, and his automatic was packed away on the carrier's back. But 
he had been too long a soldier to betray anxiety in the face of 
danger. The quartet continued their innocent occupation, crowding 
ever closer, but had not quite summoned up courage to try their 
fortunes against so stern-featured a gringo when they fell in with 
another group of travelers, and the four gradually faded away 
behind. Thenceforth we took care to wear our weapons in plain 
sight. 

" Rain in the Face " had with great difficulty been coaxed to his 
feet again. When darkness fell, he was still wheezing slowly on- 
ward far from the day's goal. The abrupt, stony descent was broken 
now and then by sharp rises, and we stumbled and sprawled over 
uncounted loose stones and solid boulders. At length white huts be- 
gan to stand dimly forth from the night ; the voices of unseen groups 
in the doorways under faintly suggested thatch roofs fell silent with 
astonishment as we passed; and in a climate in pleasant contrast to 
that of night-time Bogota we entered at last the little hotel of La 
Mesa. " Rain in the Face " set down his load for the last time with 
a stage groan, grasped his fee after the customary plea for more, and 
with the parting information that he was " poor but honest," raised his 
wreck of a straw hat and disappeared to be seen no more. 

Morning found us in a long town on a shelf -edge overhanging a 
great tumbled valley, still a mile above sea-level, again facing the 
problem of how to make our baggage get up and walk. When we had 
tramped a hot and stony half-day without getting a yard further on 
our journey, we returned to the hotel. Hays stretched out on — and 
over — his bed and drew out his faithful Ramsey, bent on drowning 
his worldly troubles in study. The first sentence that stepped forth 
from the page, inviting translation into Spanish, asserted: 

" In South America are many arid regions through which travel and 
the transportation of baggage is difficult." 

47 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

Yet there are those who hold that text-books are not closely re- 
lated to practical life ! 

Well on in the day, however, we did get two feeble youths to agree 
to carry a suitcase each to Jirardot for $180 and third-class fare back 
to La Mesa. At this rate we could soon have better afforded to build 
a railroad. Indeed, we had already reduced to an absurdity the ex- 
periment of trying to mix the tramp and the gentleman. " A sahib," 
said Kim, " is always tied to his baggage." It dominates every move- 
ment and is, after all, of scant value in proportion to the burden it 
imposes. Hire a carrier and he is always intruding upon your dreams 
and meditations, and with all the expense and trouble no article of the 
pack can you lay hands on during all the day's tramp. Moreover, I 
am not of that kidney that can make a beast of burden of my fellow- 
man. I soon found that a cargador toiling under my load behind me 
made me far more weary than to carry it myself. We decided to 
revert to type at the next halt and play the " sahib *' no longer. 

The road, now chiefly deshecho ("unmade"), descended swiftly 
into the genuine tropics and the next afternoon we sweated into 
Jirardot on the Magdalena, a month from the day we had left it to 
ascend to Bogota. For all our resolutions, however, neither of us 
contemplated with pleasure the prospect of turning ourselves into pack- 
animals. We set afoot word that we would pay a high monthly wage 
to any lad with a stout back and no particular grade of intelligence 
who would consent to leave home. But the youths of Jirardot were 
even less ambitious than those of the capital. We set a time limit, ad- 
vanced it, and at last fell upon our possessions with the rage of de- 
spair. What we did not succeed in throwing away we made into two 
bundles of the maximum weight allowed by parcel-post and sent them 
down the Magdalena to Panama and Quito. We were forced to sacri- 
fice even the " One- Volume Library," which did not matter, for we 
had found it more convenient to buy native novels and toss them away 
leaf by leaf, thus daily reducing our load. Moreover, we had resolved 
to read thenceforth only the literature of the country in which we were 
traveling. Even then there swung from our shoulders some fifteen 
pounds each, besides the awkward developing-tank filled with films and 
chemicals with which we alternately burdened ourselves, when we 
crossed the little toll-bridge over the Magdalena and, leaving the de- 
partment of Cundinamarca behind, struck off into that of Tolima. 

An extensive plain, half desert with drought now, blazing hot and 
sandy, spread far away before us. At first, mud huts were frequent, 

48 



FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

and many country people passed driving drooping donkeys. Curs 
abounded. Here and there a leper, squatted beside the trail, languidly 
held out his supplicating stumps. Everywhere were the rock-hard 
hills of termite '- ants," sharp-pointed as the volcanoes of Guatemala, 
while trains of stinging red ones crossed the road at frequent in- 
tervals. Fields of tobacco and corn stood shriveled beneath the un- 
clouded sun ; troops of horses and mules laden with the narcotic weed, 
rolled into cigarros dc Ambalema and wrapped in dry plantain- 
leaves, shuffled past in the dust before their shrieking and whistling 
arrieros, bound for Jirardot and modern transportation. The camino 
real, still a " royal highway " in spite of its condition, passed now 
and then through clumsy swinging gates that marked the limits of 
otherwise unbounded haciendas. We met several haughty horsemen 
in ruanas and the conventional wealth of accoutrement, and once a 
cavalcade of men and women, the latter lurching uncomfortably back 
and forth on their high side-saddles. The half-Indian peon dog-trot- 
ting behind them carried on his back a large chair with a sheet over it, 
only the squalling that accompanied him suggesting what it con- 
cealed. The caste system was noticeable even here on the broad 
plain. When we had carriers behind us, natives afoot raised their 
hats and horsemen gave us friendly greetings. Now, with our pos- 
sessions on our own backs, we received only frozen stares, except from 
an occasional peon who grunted it us as equals. A few miles beyond 
the Magdalena we came to the parting of the ways. One sandy trail 
led south to Neiva and Popayan ; the other, with which we swung to 
the right, struck off for Ibague and the Quindio pass over the Central 
Cordillera of the Andes. We took this longer route to Quito that 
we might traverse the great Cauca valley. 

The pedometer registered a mere ten miles when we halted at an 
adobe hut that to the natives was a " very fine posada." A bedraggled 
old woman pottered nearly two hours over a stick fire in the back yard 
before she brought us two fried eggs and a small dish of fried 
plantains, as succulent as wooden chips. Our " bed " she prepared 
by throwing a reed mat on the hardest earth floor known to geography, 
and by no means as level as the surrounding plain. My shoes and 
leggings did poor service as pillow, and Hays charged Ramsey with 
lack of foresight in not binding his grammar in upholstered plush. 
We were awakened from the first nap by the hubbub of a group of 
fellow-travelers, nearly all women, who piled their bundles in a corner 
and stretched themselves out on such floor-space as we had left unoc- 

49 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

cupied. Yet the ethics of the road are such in Spanish-America that 
we felt no misgiving in leaving our unprotected possessions on a bench 
at the door. 

With the first hint of dawn our fellow-lodgers stole silently away. 
Hays was still abed when I struck off in a gorgeous morning across a 
sea of light-brown bunch-grass, surrounded on all sides by far-off 
mountain ranges. Behind, blue-purple with distance, the face of the 
plateau on which sits Bogota in its solitude, stretched wall-like across 
the eastern horizon, high indeed, yet how slightly above the earth as a 
whole. Ahead, the snow-clad rounded cone of Tolima stood sharply 
forth above a nearer range that cut off its base, while a tumbled moun- 
tain landscape beyond promised less monotonous if more laborious 
days to come. 

A native carpenter working on the new toll bridge over the brawling 
Collo river assured us he would much rather be on the road with us, 
but that " unfortunately," he was contracted. For a time broken 
ground and rocky foothills cut down our progress. Soon we were 
back again on a level plain of vast extent, a bit higher than the pre- 
ceding, a garden spot in fertility, though largely uncultivated, with 
mountains on every hand and Tolima close on the west. As I had 
already found in Honduras, these upland plains, perfectly level, cov- 
ered with grass but for a threading of faint paths all following the 
same general direction, afford the finest walking in the world. Never 
hard, always high enough to catch a cool breeze, often shaded, gener- 
ally winding enough to avoid the monotony of a straight road, they 
make the journey like strolling across an endless lawn or through some 
vast orchard. Now and then we passed a tinkling mule-train, a 
horseman, or an Indian short-distance pedestrian, but never a vehicle 
to disturb the reflective peace of a perfect tramp. Every hour or two 
we drifted together, generally at a hut selling gnarapo, a half-fer- 
mented beverage of crude sugar and water, tasting mildly like cider 
and extremely thirst-quenching. Every species of pack-animal ap- 
peared, — mules, horses, donkeys, steers, bulls, women, children, and 
even men, all toiling eastward. Often a dozen horses marched in a 
sort of Iockstep, the halter of each tied to the tail of the animal ahead. 
Many had one or both ears cropped short, not by some accident or 
gratuitous cruelty, as we at first imagined, but as a system of branding. 
Now and then a shifting load brought an arriero running to throw his 
ruana over the animal's eyes, blind-folding it until it was prepared to 

50 



FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

go on again. One mule-train of more than forty animals was loaded 
with large boxes marked " Ausfuhrgut; Antwerpen, Colon, Buenaven- 
tura." German goods consumed in Bogota often make this round- 
about journey, — to Panama, by ship to Buenaventura, by train over 
the western range, and more than half way across Colombia on pack 
animals, all to avoid the exorbitant rates of English-owned steamers up 
the Magdalena. 

The haciendas of this region, producing chiefly tobacco, are owned 
by absentee landlords and managed by mayordomos. The peon labor- 
ers are paid twenty cents a day with food. Arrieros on the road aver- 
age fifty cents a day and " find " themselves. A few of the latter 
paused to inquire our destination and otherwise satisfy a fathomless 
curiosity. Our usual answer, — " Al Cauca," always brought forth a 
startled, — " Como ! Por tierra?" (By land?). In the Andes the 
expression is used with no thought of the sea as an alternative, but 
as the opposite of "A caballo " (On horseback). Occasionally we 
purposely astounded an inquirer by telling the whole truth. After a 
speechless moment in which his face clouded over with an unspoken 
accusation, he usually answered that though we might perhaps fancy 
we were walking to Quito, we were misinformed, and hurried on after 
his animals without even the customary " Adios." 

Now and then we met a lone arriero, " singing his troubles to the 
solitude," as a Colombian poet has it, and once I was overtaken by 
a man who cried breathlessly as soon as his voice could reach me : 

" Ha visto, senor, un muchachito con un burro vacio," to which I 
could only reply; 

" No, I regret to have to tell you that I have not seen a small boy 
with an empty donkey," and watch the distracted fellow race on over 
the horizon. 

We early discovered the uselessness of asking countrymen of the 
Andes that simple little question : 

"How far is it to—?" 

Ramsey himself could not have catalogued all the strange answers 
we received, even in the first few days. A few of them ran : 

" Perhaps an hour, senor." 

"Only an hour?" 

" Xo more, senor, but because there is much cuesta (ascent or de- 
scent) perhaps it is two or three hours." 

Or the reply came : 

51 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

"How far? On foot or on horseback, sefior?" Or, more often, 
"By sea or by land?" Some, tossing their heads toward the sun, 
replied : 

" At evening prayers you are there," or shook their heads with : 
"No alcanzan — you will not arrive, sefiores." 

" Todavia 'sta lejos — It is still far." 

" How far, more or less ; an hour, or three days ? " 

" Between the two, sefiores." 

" Three leagues, then ? " 

" Ma-a-a-a-a-as, sefiores, — Much more." 

" Sigue no mas — Just keep on going ; Al otro ladito — On the 
other little side; A la vueltita no mas — Around the little corner no 
more; Arribita — A little above; No mas bajita queda — Just down 
below it remains " — and so on through all the gamut of misinforma- 
tion ; never a simple " So-many miles." Above all, it was fatal to ask 
a leading question. The misinformant was sure to agree with us at all 
costs, evidently out of mere politeness. One might fancy the ancient 
rulers of the Andes demanded an affirmative answer from their sub- 
jects on penalty of death ; and the supposition would account for 
many of the stories of miraculous appearances, of place names and 
the like, gathered by the Conquistadores. At best, we were assured : 

" No hay donde perderse — There is no place to lose yourselves " — 
and were almost sure to strike, within ten minutes, a misleading fork 
in the trail. 

With fifteen miles behind us I slipped gratefully from under my 
awkward thirty pounds before one of a cluster of thatched huts 
called " Hotel Mi Casa," on the earth floor of which two broken-legged 
cots were placed for us. Water to drink was doled out grudgingly; 
washing was a luxury none indulged in. Hays was busy consuming 
six home-made cigars, called " tobacos comunes," that had cost him 
a sum total of one cent. As we sat before the hovel watching the 
sunset throw its reflections on the red cliffs of the range behind us, 
the day went out like an extinguished lamp and the stars came sud- 
denly forth in striking brilliancy. The north star of our home sky 
was now below the horizon, and many a long month was due to pass 
before we should see it again. 

The plateau ahead was even vaster than it seemed. I had walked 
hours next morning by one of those easy haphazard upland trails, and 
still it lay endless before me. Clumps of short, squat trees flecked it 
with shadows here and there, but for the most part it was bare alike 

52 




Hays, seated before the "Hotel Mi Casa" and behind one of his $5 cigars, watching the 

reflection of the sunset on the dull-red, broken range we had climbed 

during a long, stiff day 




A bit of the road by which we mounted to the Quindio pass over the central range, with 

forests of the slender palms peculiar to the region. The trail is more prone to 

pitch headlong up or down the mountainside than to follow a flank 

in this orderly manner 



FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

of the planting of nature or man. Cattle grazed on every hand, and 
mule-trains went and came frequently. In every direction stood row 
upon row of jagged mountain ranges, fading away into the haziest 
distance. They seemed of a world wholly cut off from the whisper- 
ing stillness of the broad brown plain. Turning, I could see untold 
mile upon mile behind me. The blue Central Cordillera that shut 
off the valley of the Cauca lay piled into the sky ahead. Like a hair 
on a colored glass, I could make out our sharply ascending trail of the 
days to come crawling upward toward the Quindio. 

On the rim of the mountain lap that holds Ibaque, spread about 
a bulking church at the base of the first great buttresses of the chain, I 
came upon Hays in the shade of a leper's hut. Before the marks of 
his ailment came upon him the outcast had climbed with his mules for 
many years back and forth over the great barrier, and something like 
a tear glistened in his eye as we turned our faces toward the land of 
his youth. The " Hotel Paris," in the town below, looked a century 
old with its quaint wooden rejas of colonial days to peer out through 
— and also in at, as a half-intoxicated ibaguefio demonstrated by 
thrusting his face in upon us while we were battling with the stains 
of travel. When I took him to task, he answered wonderingly, " Why, 
e\*ery one does it, senor," and refused to take any hint short of a basin 
o f water. 

Ibague, capital of the province of Tolima, claims 2300 " souls." 
The count takes much for granted. It is a peaceful, roomy little town 
on a gentle, grassy slope where every resident has ample space to put 
up his chalky little straw-roofed cottage, yet all toe the street line, 
as if fearful of missing anything that might unexpectedly pass. 
Square-cornered, with almost wholly one-story buildings, its calles 
are atrociously cobbled, the few sidewalks worn perilously slippery 
and barely wide enough for two feet at once. A stream of crystal- 
clear water gurgles down each street through cobbled gutters, lulling 
the travel-weary to sleep — and furnishing a convenient means of 
washing photographic films. We drank less often, however, after we 
had strolled up to the edge of the mountain and found three none-too- 
handsoine ladies bathing in the reservoir. 

On a corner of the grass-grown plaza the nephews of Jorge Isaacs, 
greatest of Colombian novelists, run a clothing store. But it was our 
misfortune to find them out of town. On another corner I made my 
way up an aged stone stairway of one of the rare two-story buildings 
of Ibague to the alcalde's office. It was lined with dog-eared docu- 

53 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

ments, all hand-written, each batch marked with a year, before which 
lounged clerks incessantly rolling cigarettes. When he had read our 
government paper in a stage whisper, the youthful mayor at once put 
the town entirely at our disposal. I suggested schools. 

" Senor Ministro de Instruction Publica ! " he called out, with long, 
oratorical cadences. 

Instantly there tiptoed into the room a long, tremulous man of fifty, 
almost shabbily dressed, though of course with what had once been a 
white collar, with a pedagogical cast of countenance and a chin barely 
an inch below his upper lip. He bowed low at the alcalde's orders 
and answered that the matter would be attended to at once — mafiana. 

Toward ten next morning the Minister of Public Instruction, who 
had evidently laundered his collar during the night, left a long line of 
people waiting and set off with me. 

" They are only teachers, waiting for their appointments or salaries," 
he explained. 

We halted before a large building. The Minister knocked meekly 
with his cane on the heavy zagaan, the door to the patio, and was 
finally admitted by a square-faced, muscular, unshaven priest, who 
listened to our request at some length and at last led us to an older 
churchman, suave, slender, outwardly effusive, and of that perfectly 
polished exterior that marks the Jesuit. He was also French. When 
time enough had elapsed to give warning of our coming, he led the 
way into a room of first-grade pupils, — all boys of six or seven, except 
two full-grown Indian youths. An exceedingly young priest, giving 
an excellent imitation of surprise at our appearance, snapped a sort 
of wooden hand-clapper, and the entire class rose to their feet bowing 
profoundly. Some other formality was imminent when I begged the 
teacher to go on with the lesson just as if I were not there. He 
exchanged a glance with his superior at this extraordinary gringo re- 
quest, then lined the class up in military ranks and set them to reading 
aloud. The theme was strictly religious in nature and most of the 
words of four or five syllables. As often as the clapper sounded, the 
boys changed to " next " and read with such fluency that only the tail- 
end of a phrase here and there was intelligible. The priest made no 
corrections or criticisms whatever, " taught," indeed, as he might have 
turned a hurdy-gurdy handle. I fancied the pupils extraordinarily 
well-trained — until I strolled down the room, to the evident horror of 
the adults, and noted that almost none of them had the book open at 
the page they were " reading." 

54 



FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

In a higher-grade room I was asked to choose the lesson, and sug- 
gested geography. A youth passed a pointer swiftly over a wall-map, 
spinning off a description, learned by rote, of the principal cities, the 
youthful priest lifting him back on the track whenever he forgot the 
exact language of the original and came to a wordless halt. Little 
helpful hints accompanied each question. A boy stood before the 
map of Colombia, on which the capital was printed in enormous let- 
ters. 

"What city did Quesada found in 1538?" asked the priest. 

Blank silence from the boy. 

The priest : " Bo — bogo — " 

" Bogota ! " shouted the boy. 

My fellow-visitors smiled complacently at his wisdom. 

" And what place is this ? " quizzed the teacher, pointing to a strip 
of land that curved like a tail up into a corner of the map, " Pa — 
Pana— " 

" Panama " shrieked the boy, " A province of Colombia which is 
now in rebellion. The . . ." 

He was evidently going on with still more startling information 
when the all but imperceptible twitching of an eye of the Jesuit superior 
turned the pointer to other climes. 

The teacher never lost an opportunity to give a religious twist to the 
proceedings. A boy whose pointer hovered over the Mediterranean 
mumbled: 

" And another of the cities is Nicea. . . ." 

" Ah," cried the priest, " And what celebrated event in the history 
of mankind took place in Nicea?" 

" The great Council of the Church in which . . ." began the youth, 
and rattled on as glibly as if he had been there in person. 

When we had turned out into the street, the shabby little Ministro 
became confidential, explaining that the colegio toward which we were 
headed had once held a large student body, " but now, senor, owing to 
political changes. . . ." 

" Before the priests interfered I had an excellent experienced normal 
graduate in charge of that first class," he sighed as we parted, " and 
now we have that boy in a cassock. Bah ! " 

We left Ibague by taking the wrong road and had to crawl for miles 
along the steep bank of a mountain stream almost back to town before 
we were set right. Then began one of the greatest climbs of our joint 
careers. Round and round, in intoxicated zigzags, went the trail, 

55 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

as if dizzy at the task before it, down into several gullies until at last, 
finding no other means of escape, it took to clambering laboriously up- 
ward. At first the weather was hot, then gradually cooled as far- 
reaching views of Ibague and its surroundings spread out below us. 
The buttresses of the range ahead were enormous, as if nature, plan- 
ning to build here such a mountain chain as never before, had started 
the outcropping supports on her most gigantic scale. Toward nine 
I realized that I was out of the sunshine and no longer sweating, 
despite the swiftness of the ascent ; at ten I paused to pick wild straw- 
berries along the way. It did not seem possible to mount much 
further, for there was nothing higher visible. But like Jack of the 
Beanstalk, I climbed on entirely out of sight — into the clouds that 
wholly shut off the world below. At noon, when I stretched out on a 
swift slope to read a few pages of " Maria," immense reaches of 
mountains and cloud-stenciled valleys, half-hidden by masses of snow- 
white mist, like drapery that concealed yet revealed their plump, 
feminine forms, lay everywhere below and about me. Over all the 
tumbled view were scattered little huts of mountaineers, each in a 
setting it seemed possible to have reached only on wings. 

The hovel where we planned to spend the night refused us posada, 
and, as dusk fell, we faced an all but perpendicular mountain wall, up 
the stony, half-wooded face of which the trail staggered. The few 
groups of men we met carried ancient rifles loosely, as if constantly 
ready for action. At dark I toiled to a summit to find Hays standing 
before a mud rancho arguing with the crude mountaineers who would 
have sent us on into the night with the threadbare Spanish prevarica- 
tion, " Only a little further on there is another house all ready to re- 
ceive you." In its utter lack of comfort the place resembled the moun- 
tain hamlets of northwestern Spain. The people were shy, yet, once 
won over, kind-hearted. " There is no bed," they explained, " but 
there is perhaps a leather you can sleep on." By and by the woman 
called us into the kitchen for a bowl of caldo, hot water with chunks 
of potato and an egg dropped in it, served with coarse corn-bread. 
Then the man led the way into a cell made entirely of mud, even to 
the bench along the wall, on which he laid a hairy, sun-dried cowhide. 
Fortunately he returned a little later with several aged gunny-sacks, 
a tiny girl lighting the way with a rope-like native candle, or we should 
not have slept even the bit we did. 

Streaks of pale day were beginning to steal through the chinks in 
our chamber when the woman appeared with black coffee and a stony 
I 56 



FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

corn biscuit, and we were off for another day of stiff ups and downs. 
Stalking down a knee-breaking descent, I heard a shout of astonish- 
ment from Hays ahead. What looked like an ordinary mountain 
stream cut across the trail at the bottom of a sharp little gully. But 
the water, coming from the bowels of Tolima that stood somewhere 
above us in the mists of morning, was almost hot. We had both 
been on the road in many a clime, but never before where nature was 
kind enough to heat a morning bath for us. We lost no time in 
stripping for a luxury rare to the traveler in Colombia. 

Not far beyond we came to the edge of the valley of the Toche. 
Away below, like a miniature painting, reposed a peaceful little vale 
wholly shut in by sheer mountain walls, a thread-like stream meander- 
ing the length of it. It took us an hour to make the swift, stony 
descent. Not all get down so safely, as the skeletons of a horse and 
a mule, their shoes still on, testified. The valley floor, watered by the 
rock-broiling stream, was a fertile patch of earth, and the steep moun- 
tain flanks were planted far up with little perpendicular patches of 
corn. All the scene seemed as far removed from the wide world as 
if on another sphere. 

A rocky trail climbed abruptly up out of the valley again from the 
further end, higher than ever, past rare houses, built of the red boards 
of a tree called cedro, from the doors of which stared shy, half- 
friendly people in bedraggled tatters. The Quindio pass lies only 
11,440 feet above the sea, but that by no means represents the climb- 
ing necessary to surmount the Central Cordillera of the Andes. What 
is so called is really a long series of ranges, and no sooner did the 
road reach some lofty summit than it dived as swiftly and roughly 
down again. It was not a planned road, like the highways of the 
Alps, but one grown up of itself. A jaguar once wandered over the 
Cordillera, a man followed, and to-day the route holds to the same 
course. Toiling like draft-animals, gasping for breath in the rarefied 
air, we fancied a score of times that we had reached the summit, only 
to see the trail take another switchback and disclose the perfidious fact 
that it had found another ridge to surmount. 

A few hundred feet above the Toche began clumps, then entire 
forests of a tall, slender wax-palm, a species named by Humboldt on 
his journey over the Quindio. Having only a tuft of branches at the 
top, these were often torn off by the winds that rage down through 
the gullies, leaving a thing as unromantic as a telegraph-pole. The 
valley below opened out until half a world, dull-brown with a tinge 

57 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

of green, lay below and around us. Words are hopelessly inadequate 
to describe this bird's eye view of range upon range, climbing pell- 
mell one over the other, as if in terror to escape some savage pursuer, 
and fading away into the dimmest misty-blue distance. 

The sun was low when we came out on as far-reaching a view ahead 
and saw the morrow's task laid out before us in the form of a thread- 
like road twisting away out of sight over a great mountain barrier 
draped in clouds, the " puro Quindio," or chief range, at last. As 
night descended, we entered " Volcancito," an unusually large adobe 
building on a bleak slope. The dining-room, which was also the back 
corredor, was overrun by a large family, chiefly small girls, each in a 
single, thin, knee-high cotton garment, despite the wintry mountain 
air. Chickens, dogs, and gaunt, self-assertive pigs wandered every- 
where without restraint. In a corner slouched a woman sewing gar- 
ments too small for the smallest child in sight. Our plea for lodging 
she treated with scorn. " Volcancito " was a posada, not a hotel, the 
difference between the two in Spanish-America being that in a hotel 
the traveler is permitted to expect certain conveniences while in a 
posada he accepts with* smiling gratitude whatever fortune chooses to 
furnish him. 

" We have only two guest rooms," snapped the woman, when we 
persisted, as if the mere giving of the information was an unusual 
favor. " One this senor has with his wife and baby. The other belongs 
to the arrieros." 

The successful guest was an actor on his way from the Cauca to 
Bogota, a handsome fellow much over-dressed for such a journey, 
with a strikingly beautiful young wife, as we noted at a glance through 
the door. 

" But there are five rooms on this side of the house," I suggested. 

" Family rooms," shot back the woman. 

"And this little room in the corner?" 

" Belongs to the servant," she mumbled, projecting her lips toward 
a slatternly young female who was at that moment pursuing a thieving 
pig from the dungeon-like kitchen. 

" Anything will do," sighed Hays, gazing abstractedly after the 
servant. 

But the landlady was in no mood for crude jokes. 

" There is a fine house with rooms and beds just four cuadros on," 
she lied, after a long silence. Fortunately this was by no means my 
first experience with the favorite trick of Spanish-speaking races to be 

58 



FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

rid of importunate guests, or we might have tramped all night on the 
mountain top in a cold as penetrating as that of January in our own 
land. I slipped surreptitiously from under my pack, assuming the 
ingratiating manner that is the last resort with the apathetic people of 
the Andes. We were resolved to spend the night there, though it be 
in walking the floor. Nothing is more fatal than to appear anxious 
in such situations, however, and we affected indifference and a pre- 
tense of having accepted her verdict. 

What fine, red-cheeked little girls she had, so pretty and healthy. 
(Indeed, they looked like Irish children). Was she not from the 
Cauca? She was. Ah, the magnificent Cauca, the most beauti- 
ful. . . . She was soon lost in a panegyric of her native valley, as she 
shuffled from kitchen to sewing-machine and back again. 

" Magnificent, indeed," I agreed, " and in only a day or two we shall 
be there. So what matters a night of freezing in the mountains ? By 
the way, la sefiora can perhaps sell us a bit of coffee and a bite to eat 
before we set out to tramp all night? " 

She grunted assent and a half-hour later we were seated before a 
plentiful, if not epicurean, meal. Before we had finished it, she re- 
marked casually that we might " arrange ourselves " in the room with 
the arrieros. The mule-driver is seldom a pleasant bed-fellow, but 
compared with a night out of doors, probably with rain, at more than 
two miles above sea-level, any arrangement was welcome. 

We fancied lodging had first been refused us because we were 
foreigners. Soon after supper we were undeceived. Out of the 
darkness came the sound of horse's hoofs, and as it ceased there burst 
in upon us a handsome young Colombian, of somewhat dissolute fea- 
tures, in the ruana, false trouser-legs, ringing cartwheel spurs, and 
the other hundred and one details of equipment the rules of society 
require of a Colombian of " gente decente " rank who travels ahorse. 
He gave greeting in the explosive speech of his class and requested 
lodging. 

" No hay," answered the woman, in the identical cold monotone she 
had used toward us. 

The new-comer began dancing on air, waving his lady-like hands, 
on which gleamed several rings, above him. Eloquence worthy of a 
world congress poured from his lips ; his eyes seemed to spurt fire. 

" No hay," repeated the landlady, in the same dead voice. 

" But senora, it is imperative. I have a lady with me ! Anything 
will do — such as these rooms." 

59 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

" Family rooms," snapped the caucana, as if reciting a learned dia- 
logue. 

" But your guest rooms? " 

" One this senor has with his wife and baby. The other belongs to 
the arrieros — and also," jerking her head slightly toward us, " to these 
two caballeros." 

" But what am I to do ? " shrieked the Colombian, " and a lady with 
me?" 

The woman muttered a " Quien sabe " with a careless shrug of the 
shoulders and continued her sewing without looking up. After a last 
vain oration the Colombian dashed off angrily, his horseback garments 
standing out at excited angles, and rode away into the night the way 
we had come, toward better luck perhaps among the huts at the 
bottom of the valley. 

Bedtime comes at about seven in these wintry, fireless, lightless 
regions. The landlady, now thoroughly mollified, broke off some story 
of the wonders of the Cauca to say : 

" Next to the room of the arrieros is a harness-room where you can 
sleep alone. Many ingleses — all light-haired foreigners are " Eng- 
lishmen'' to the rural Colombian — -have slept in it. 

Why had she not offered us this upon our arrival? Lack of confi- 
dence, probably, common to these simple people as is the good-hearted- 
ness that can be unearthed by a few simple wiles and flatteries. The 
dungeon-like room was narrow, but long and high, strewn with the 
aparejo of mules and the crude implements of husbandry, with 
harnesses, pack-saddles and a chaos of trappings, but with space left 
to spread on the earth floor several tar-cloth wrappings of mule-loads. 
Moreover, the woman sent us a blanket. Later a boy entered carrying 
a candle and a little round hard pillow which he delivered with a 
speech apologetic with diminutives, after the fashion of the country 
people of the Andes, " Aqui tienen u'te'es una almohadita para poner 
la cabecita." 

For all these unexpected luxuries, I can hardly say we slept well. 
Before an hour had passed, a polar winter began to creep up through 
the earth floor, through the tar-cloth, through our flesh and bones, and 
what with the aching of hips and other salient points that fitted the 
uneven earth poorly, the night passed in an endless series of dream- 
fights against death in the polar seas. As my legs grew cold beyond 
endurance, I found a pair of zamarras, the false trouser-legs of im- 
pervious cloth worn by horsemen of the region. But my glee quickly 

60 



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FROM BOGOTA OVER THE QUINDIO 

evaporated, for they proved to be designed for a half-grown boy. 
Humboldt spent ten days in passing the Quindio, we sincerely hoped 
he had been better supplied with blankets, even though his journey 
was in the summer season. 

For once we felt no anger when a hoarse rooster at last greeted the 
first graying of the darkness. The entire night had been a half-con- 
scious battle for the cobija that had covered us alternately. With 
creaking legs I stepped out into the icy dawn, and washed in a wind 
that cut through me as a rapier through a man of straw. It was 
still gray-black, and vast seas of half-seen mist lay in the bottomless 
chasms roundabout. Far away to the east, where the dawn and the 
warmth come from, was a triangular patch of sky, low down between 
two ranges and roofed with black clouds, in which the brilliant sun- 
shine of the tierra caliente was already blazing red. One of the 
bravest acts of my life was the stripping and changing to road garb, 
after which we joined the family and our fellow-guests, huddled under 
shawls and blankets, with folds of woolen cloth about their throats and 
over their noses. The landlady, still abed, issued orders from within 
to her bare-legged girls and the servant. One of these threw into a 
pot of boiling water a mud-ball of native chocolate, swirled the mess 
with a stick, and served it to us with a dough-cake mixture of mashed 
corn and rice. It was no homeopathic food, but none lasts long in 
this thin, exhilarating air, while climbing swift mountain flanks. When 
we inquired for our bill, the woman called out that we owed twenty 
cents each, and bade us Godspeed to her beloved Cauca. 

The road was heavy and slippery with the rain that had fallen 
during the night; the air still sharp and penetrating. We had all but 
spent the night on the summit of the Quindio, for the highest point 
was but three miles beyond, though three miles of climbing without 
respite. Most of the world was shut off by great cloud-banks, out of 
which came frequently the bawling of arrieros cursing their weary 
animals upward. Now and then we stopped on knolls above the trail 
to watch these Andean freight-trains pass. Many of the pack-animals 
were bulls and steers, of slight strength as such compared to the 
horse or mule, but the surest, if slowest, cargo-beast in muddy going. 
The arrieros, almost without exception, wore as ruanas what had 
once been United States mail-sacks, the stripes and lettering still 
clear upon them. 

There were several ridges so nearly alike in altitude that the exact 
summit might easily have been in dispute ; but at last we reached the 

61 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

dividing line between the departments of Tolima and the Cauca, 
marked with a weather-blackened post planted roundabout with scores 
of little twig crosses set up by pious arrieros and travelers. We were 
so completely surrounded by impenetrable swirling mist that we could 
see nothing whatever but the patch of cold, wet ground underfoot, a 
few dismal dripping bushes, and here and there a dishevelled shiver- 
ing flower of some hardy species. Not a glimpse was to be had of 
snow-clad Tolima that must lie piled into the mist somewhere close 
at hand. It was the highest either of us had ever been in the world. 
While we appreciated the eminence, it was no place for men gifted 
with profane vocabularies to linger, and we were soon legging it down 
the western slope out of Cloudland. 



62 



CHAPTER IV 

ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY 

ON the Cauca side, like the French slope of the Pyrenees, the 
Central Cordillera of the Andes descends almost abruptly to 
the valley. As we emerged from the clouds, a brilliant sun 
lighted up vast landscapes of labyrinthian hills and vales mottled with 
cloud shadows, bits of our road ahead scratched here and there on 
salient, sun-polished knobs and slopes far below. With noon ap- 
peared the first broad view of the rolling Cauca valley, nestled between 
the central and the western ranges, a bare thousand feet above sea- 
level, still deep-blue as some mountain-girdled lake. The little town 
of Salento, in the lap of an undulating, bright green plain, rose slowly 
up to meet us. We marched to the alcalde's office in a weak-kneed 
building of compacted clay, only to find the alcalde, like beds for 
travelers, out of town. A stupid clerk in a room full of musty papers 
of varying antiquity admitted it was too bad Salento was so atrasado, 
but made no move to decrease that backwardness. 

" And strangers who arrive ? " I asked. 

" Generally bring their beds with them," he replied, " or, if not, they 
do the best they can." 

We took the hint and forcible possession of an empty room opening 
on the plaza. When, after a basin bath, I strolled out into the town 
to mention our strange exotic desire for sleeping accommodations, a 
dozen of the most influential citizens also admitted it was too bad and 
— and where did we come from and where were we going? Hays for 
once had better luck. Having left the mention of beds to simmer in 
the mind of one Sanchez, who amused himself at shop-keeping on a 
corner of the square, he was called over at dark and offered the use 
of several woolly white blankets that hung for sale from the blackened 
beams of the shop ceiling. Sanchez was shocked beyond measure 
when we started to carry them across the plaza ourselves. He called 
for a boy, nine responded, and the winner expressed great gratitude 
when we rewarded him with a ragged paper cent. We improvised 
seats and sat gazing out through the wooden reja. Far away on a 

63 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

. fuzzy hillside our road of the morning grew dim and faded out, like an 
unfixed photograph, and a night lighted only by stars quickly settled 
down. Out of its black immensity came, a little later, the jangling of 
tiny bells. Across the plaza filed a half hundred boys in column of 
twos, weirdly lighted by flickering torches, utterly silent in their bare 
feet. From another direction came a similar half-seen procession of 
girls ; the two columns joined at the door of the little bamboo church, 
the pagoda-like twin towers of which stood dimly forth against the 
background of darkness, and passed within together. For an hour a 
weird infantile chanting in chorus sounded almost unbrokenly, then 
the congregation filed forth again and melted away into the humid 
summer night. The faint silhouette of the priest showed him leaning 
over the reja of his second-story casa curd, the fitful glow of his ciga- 
rette the only light in town, until that, too, died out and left only the 
brilliant tropical stars above. 

Beyond Salento a rolling fertile land lay on every hand. In the 
great forests spreading far up the range beside and behind us, the 
most conspicuous of the flora was the yarumo, a white-leaved tree that 
stood forth everywhere like blotches on the green landscape. The 
slender wax-palm of the eastern slope had not passed the crest. The 
dense-green uplands of the valley were still all but covered with virgin 
forests. It set us reflecting what might have been had the " May- 
flower " turned southward and peopled this land of rich soil and un- 
rivalled climate, instead of that bleak and rigorous country we had left 
behind. Or would this peerless climate have made us, too, salentinos ? 

At the hut where we paid two cents for great bowls of creamy milk, 
there was a decision to make. One branch of the trail led to Pereira, 
the other to Filandia. We tossed a coin. It fell " tails " and we 
struck off to the left by a soft dirt road. Filandia was a quaint old 
place with a wonderful gingerbread church, on a hilltop that rolled 
languidly away on all sides to far-off mountain ridges. The town 
seemed never to have seen a foreigner before. Perhaps travelers 
hitherto had all gone by way of Pereira. When I attempted to take a 
picture, the entire population, men, women, and the very babies, 
crowded so close around me that I could not fight them back to a focal 
distance. 

By the next afternoon we were in quite a different country, — down 
in the tropics again, with coffee-trees, bananas, and endless lanes of 
bamboo, that giant fern, as useful as it is beautiful, which nature so 
unkindly denied the North. It was not a temperature for the pre- 

64 




Like those of the days of Shakespeare, the theater of Cartago consists of a stage — of split 

bamboo, with a tile roof — inside the patio of the "hotel." The more expensive 

seats are chairs in the balcony of the second story; the populace 

stands in the barnyard 




jJ^A-> 




m**** 



Cartago watching our departure. Two of the doors show no occupants only because these 
had dodged inside to call the rest of the family 



ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY 

serving of undeveloped films and I paused with the tank beside the 
first clear stream. The sun gave out before I had more than hung the 
strips up to dry, drops of rain began to fall, and night came on apace. 
I pushed on, grasping a wet film in either hand. To my dismay the 
road turned to a narrow path through thick weeds, thigh-high, and for 
a long five miles, with eighteen already in my legs and thirty pounds 
straining from my shoulders, I tramped swiftly forward, striving to 
hold the films out of reach of the weeds. The natives, blacker and 
blacker as we descended, stared with amazement from their little 
bamboo shelters along the train to see a strange being scurry by, hold- 
ing high above his head two black strips, like Tibetan prayer-sheets. 
Small wonder they crossed themselves in superstitious awe. 

The night had grown completely in about me, when Hays hailed me 
from an unseen doorway. He had already bespoken supper and en- 
gaged a room with a bed of split bamboo and a quilted straw mat- 
tress. For me was brought what a hard-earned candle proved to be 
a canvas cot, made of a U. S. mail-sack. In the " dining-room " was a 
lounging chair of the same material. 

"Where did you get it?" I asked the woolly-haired host. 

" What, that fine, strong cloth ? Oh, the government always has 
plenty of that to sell," he replied placidly. 

The same damp, pulsating jungle fenced us in all the next morning. 
Far ahead, across the heat-steaming spread of the Cauca valley, the 
jagged blue line of the Western Cordillera, that cuts it off from the 
Pacific, stretched to north and south as far as the eye could com- 
mand, in some places five ranges visible one behind the other. At 
noon, suddenly topping a jungled knoll, we caught sight of the long- 
sought town of Cartago, reddish with the hue of its roof-tiles in the 
center of town, dying away in whitish and straw-colored lines of out- 
skirt hovels. It was hours later that we reached the level of the 
valley floor, and strolled in heavy grass through a bamboo-built suburb 
into the weedy central plaza. 

With a populous graveyard before the keel of the " Mayflower " 
was laid, Cartago has not yet advanced to what any " mushroom " town 
•of our West can boast at the age of three months. Negroes were 
everywhere, though there was no sharp " color-line," and pure whites 
were rare. The Cauca is to Colombia what our South is to the 
United States. In colonial times slaves were imported in large num- 
bers up the Atrato river, and to this day the shiftless, happy-go-lucky 
African lolls in his ragged cabins, speaking a Spanish it was hard to 

65 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

believe was not English, so exactly did their slovenly, lazy-tongued 
drawl resemble that of our southern states. 

The hotel advertised " Comodidad, prontitud y esmero " — " Com- 
fort, promptness, and specklessness," — the three things above all 
others a South American hotel is surest not to have. There is never 
an office in these hotels of the Andes. A peanut vendor somewhere up 
the street is manager, and all the town " assists " while the traveler 
makes his bargain, if, indeed, it does not gather en masse to watch his 
ablutions. The rooms are commonly stark empty, and are furnished 
to order, as one selects a chicken on the hoof for the evening meal. 
We had to implore each and every requisite, from cots to water, sepa- 
rately and individually several times over before they were supplied. 
When we insisted on two towels, the young but toothless landlady, 
muttering something about the curious ways of los gringos, tore an 
aged sheet in two, and as long as we remained made us feel that 
guests were an unmitigated nuisance. Among the luxuries of the 
town was wheat bread. When we demanded it with our meals, a six- 
foot "boy" of polished jet-black skin — and little other covering — 
was sent wandering down to market with a bushel basket on his arm, 
and in the course of the afternoon came slouching back with three tiny 
buns lost in the bottom of it. 

But for all the slovenliness of its habits, antiquarians would have 
found Cartago's hotel interesting. The barnyard patio into which we 
flung our wash-water formed the parquet, or stalls, of the village 
theater. At the back of it was an open, tile-roofed building of split 
bamboo floor and sides, violently painted, forming a stage quite similar 
to that of Shakespeare's day. A score of bottles hung by the neck, 
like corpses at some medieval wholesale hanging, fringed the outer edge 
of the platform, the ends or drippings of what had been tallow candles 
showing that they had served as proscenium footlights. The second- 
story veranda, our dining-room, was marked with the numbers of 
" boxes " around its three sides, from the unspeakable kitchen to the 
even more unmentionable servants' quarters. When plays were given, 
the masses stood in the yard below and the well-to-do looked on from 
their chairs along the veranda. Unfortunately, histrionic talent seemed 
to have completely died out in Cartago. Only the languid tinkling of 
a tiple, or native guitar, marked the long evenings in which we watched 
the golden moon rise over the bit of mossy, old-red roof and the tops 
of two lazily swaying palm-trees framed by our balcony window. 

If my knowledge of Cartago is meager, it is because I spent most 

66 



ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY 

of my days there in mailing a notebook. The post-office was the lower 
story of a compressed-mud building cornering on the plaza. When I 
first made my appearance, its heavy wooden doors, studded with im- 
mense spike-heads, were securely bolted. 

" Is the correo closed to-day ? " I asked a lounger-by. 

" Si, sefior, the mails only came in yesterday. But you can knock 
and perhaps. . . ." 

Knocking brought no result. An hour or more later I tried again, 
with no better luck. Early the next afternoon, however, I found my 
way in by an inner door of the patio, though the place was still officially 
closed. 

The two rooms looked much like a garret of long standing, but by 
no means like a post-office. Scattered everywhere, over floor and 
baked-mud window seats, on decrepit chairs and crippled tables, lay 
fat mail-bags, all stout and new, from the chief countries of the globe. 
The outgoing Colombian correspondence was already packed in aged 
grainsacks. Pieces of mail of all sizes lay tumbled and littered over 
the entire two rooms. Fully half of it was from the United States, 
particularly pamphlets and packages from patent medicine houses. 
Four middle-aged men, dressed in great dignity and in Cartago's most 
correct attire, with gloves and canes on chairs beside them, were 
seated around a table, smoking cigarettes. I handed one of them the 
wrapped notebook. It passed slowly from hand to hand, each feeling 
it over, not so much out of curiosity, though that was by no means 
lacking, as absent-mindedly striving to bring his attention down to it. 
Then all four fell to perusing a Postal Union rate-sheet, but found 
everything except the information needed. Finally one rose and re- 
ferred the matter respectfully to a man, evidently a superior, seated 
in state at a corner table. The rate was found to be one peso for each 
fifty grams. The official turned back and wandered for some time at 
random about the two rooms, fingering the parcel over and over and 
scratching his head in a vain effort to recall what he had set out to 
find. 

He discovered it at last, — an ancient postal-scales — tried it, found it 
too small, tried another, and spent an ample five minutes juggling with 
the odds and ends that served as weights before he computed the. bal- 
ance. Then he drifted languidly back to his companions in in- 
efficiency, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, and rambled once 
more across the room to the scales. He had forgotten the weight! 
This time he took no chances, but announced the figures aloud and 

&7 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

wrote them on the parcel, — " 320 grams." Those who do not know the 
South American will have difficulty in believing that the division 
of this by fifty, without troubling for fractions, presented a real prob- 
lem. All four began pencilling long lines of figures on as many sheets 
of paper. Several minutes passed before one of them ventured to 
show his result. The others compared, and amid a sage shaking of 
heads one announced solemnly, " Seven cents, sefior," while the rest 
gazed dreamily at me out of the tops of their eyes, as if wondering 
whether I should weather the shock of so great an expense. 

" And registered, seventeen cents ? " I added ; for I did not care to 
have the parcel lie a month or two about the earth floor of Cartago's 
post-office, or find its final resting-place in the back yard. When the 
suggestion had penetrated, one of the quartet sat down to enter the 
grave transaction in a large ledger. I still needed a two-cent stamp. 
The oldest of the four shuffled to the opposite side of the table, sat 
down, adjusted his legs, and slowly pulled out a drawer stuffed with 
every manner of rubbish, — tobacco, rolled cigarettes, half-empty 
phials of patent medicine, everything that may come by mail, — and 
finally dug up a battered pasteboard box that had once held No. 60 
American thread. From this he fished out a small sheet of two-peso 
stamps, carefully tore one off at the perforation, first on one side, 
then on the other, put the sheet back in the thread-box, the thread-box 
back in the drawer, carefully closed the latter, and handed me the 
stamp. I tossed before him a silver ten-cent piece. He opened the 
drawer again, clawed out of a far corner a wad of those ragged, germ- 
infested one-cent bills indigenous to Colombia, laid out eight of them, 
counted them a second time, sat staring at them a long minute while 
his attention went on furlough, asked one of his colleagues to count 
them, which the latter did twice at the same vertiginous speed, and 
finally pushed them toward me with a hesitative movement, as if he 
were sure he was losing somewhere in the transaction, but could not 
exactly figure out where. 

Meanwhile, he of the ledger rose from dotting the last " i " of an 
entry that stretched in nicely shaded copybook letters entirely across 
the double page, begged me to do him the honor to be seated, dipped 
the clumsy steel pen into the dusty inkwell, and, with a wealth of 
politenesses, requested me to sign. When I had done so, he gazed 
long and dreamily at the signature, longer still at space in general, and 
finally put the parcel carefully away in a drawer with neither stamp 
nor mark of identification upon it. 

68 




Along the Cauca Valley we met not only peasants bound to town with a load of wood and 

carrying their prize roosters, but now and then the corpse of a woman being brought in 

for Christian burial service, after which it would be carried back and 

buried in her native hills 



yp&t^ 




In places the Cauca Valley so swarmed with locusts that they rose like an immense screen 

before us as we advanced, struck us in the face in scores, and made a sound like 

that of a distant waterfall 



ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY 

" But," I protested, " Do you give no receipt for registered mail ? " 

Great excitement arose among the officials and the half-dozen per- 
sons waiting ostensibly to buy a one-cent stamp. A long conference 
ensued. 

" It is, senor," said the postmaster himself, rising and turning to me 
with regal courtesy, " that no blank receipts have been sent from 
Bogota yet this this year. However. . . ." 

He called aside the custodian of the precious ledger and gave him 
long whispered instructions. The latter hunted up a sheet of foolscap, 
stamped it carefully with the office seal, and wrote out with long legal 
flourishes — for penmanship is still an art in Colombia — a receipt 
for the parcel. This he tore off and carried across to the postmaster 
who, carefully preparing another pen, signed it with his full name, 
not forgetting the elaborate rubrica beneath it. Then he read it care- 
fully over once more, seemed dissatisfied with something, and finally 
called the attention of the writer to the rough edge he had left in 
tearing off the paper, instructing him to lay it under a ruler and trim 
it with a sharp knife. The subordinate did so and at last delivered 
to me a memento I still have in my possession. 

To one unacquainted with Latin-American ways the episode may 
seem overdrawn. I have told it, however, without exaggeration. 
From the moment I handed over the parcel until I emerged, receipt 
in hand, there had elapsed one hour and twenty minutes! 

Nor is such a scene unusual. From the Rio Grande southward, 
government offices are filled with just such human driftwood, and 
it is common experience to see several staid and pompous men in 
frock-coats spend more than an hour doing what an average American 
boy would accomplish in two minutes. 

Swinging due south next morning through the perpetual summer 
of the flat, grass-carpeted Cauca valley, we fell in with a straggling 
band of nearly a hundred youths. They were conscripts recruited 
under the new military law of Colombia, antioquefws chosen by lot 
to make up the quota of the Province of Antioquia, bound south 
from Medellin for six months compulsory service. The majority 
were crude-minded countrymen. Some, dressed in the wrecks of 
" European " suits, were undeveloped boys of the towns, hobbling 
painfully along on bruised and blistered feet, bare except for their 
cloth alpargatas. Among the latter was one Policarpo, a devil-may- 
care young fellow of high intelligence and considerable education, 
who had a very clear notion of the weak spots in his native land, 

69 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

though no inkling of a workable remedy. Another carried a tiple, 
as well as a pleasing baritone voice, and struck up at every oppor- 
tunity the languidly mournful music of the region. 

The highway now was a series of interwoven cross-country paths, 
fording the smaller streams, crossing the larger on little bamboo 
bridges with faded thatched roofs. It was hot, yet not of the op- 
pressive heat our most northern states know in mid-summer. All 
along the way were flowers of many colors, and broad vistas of 
greenest grass stretched far across slightly rolling plains wherever 
woods and jungle did not choke it out. Bands of butterflies, often 
of the most gorgeous hues, flickered here and there across the face of 
the landscape. Insects hummed contentedly and lizards scuttled 
away through the fallen leaves. Singing birds of many kinds 
abounded ; flocks of little parrots, brilliant green in color, flitted in 
and out of the bamboo groves, shrieking noisily at their games. Here 
and there quinchas, fences of split bamboo of basket-like weave, shut 
in a little cultivated patch ; and all day long the distance-blue Western 
Cordillera, with its wrinkled folds and prominences, stretching end- 
lessly north and south, seemed to cut off the Cauca like a world 
apart. 

Then for a space there were no habitations, except an abandoned 
hut or two and the ruins of several razed ones. The recruits mur- 
mured something about an epidemic, but none appeared to know any- 
thing definite concerning it. At length we descended through a shal- 
low valley, and from then on, locusts called chapul in the Cauca, rose 
in vast clouds as we advanced, covering the ground before us and 
veiling all the landscape as with a great screen, new myriads rising 
at every step, until they struck us incessantly in the face and filled 
our ears with a sound as of some great waterfall at a distance. In 
Bogota we had wondered to find an important government depart- 
ment entitled " Comision para la Extincion de la Langosta " ; now it 
seemed small, indeed, to cope with the problem. At intervals cactus 
hedges bounded the way, and the organ-cactus of desert lands 
stretched forth its stiff arms into the brilliant sky. The Cauca was 
suffering one of its periodical droughts and the accompanying scourge 
of locusts, after which it would bloom again like a tropical garden. 

The recruits so monopolized accommodations at the village of 
Naranjo — which had not the remnant of an orange-tree to explain 
its name — that we had to share a room with three none-too-white 
natives who permitted no ventilation whatever. At four they rose 

70 



ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY 

to light candles and feed their mules, and sat vociferously discussing 
nothing at all until daybreak. They spent more time harnessing 
themselves than their animals; for the Colombian never dreams of 
riding in anything less than the complete outfit demanded by local 
convention. A wide-brimmed " Panama " hat — " sombrero de junco," 
or the finer " jipijapa," he calls it — covers his head. Over his usual 
clothing, which must include coat, vest, cravat, gloves, and white 
collar, no matter how far he may be from civilization nor what the 
temperature, he wears a ruana, a garment similar to the sarape of 
Mexico, or the poncho. In the vicinity of Bogota this is of heavy 
wool and dark in color; in the Cauca it is the ruana de kilo, of light- 
colored cotton, generally gay with stripes. Beneath this the horseman 
wears samarras, ample false trouser-legs held together by strips 
front and back, and legging-like at the bottom. Sometimes these are 
of sun-dried cowhide, or goat-skins shaggy with long white hair, 
reminiscent of the " chaps " of our cowboys. Far more common are 
those of tela de caucho, " rubber cloth," consisting of two thicknesses 
of canvas and rubber woven into an impenetrable yet flexible material 
nearly an eighth of an inch thick. Then come his chilenas, huge 
wheel-like spurs ; his re jo, or lariat of twisted rawhide hanging from 
his wrist ; his alforjas, or leather saddlebags between his legs ; his 
cuchugos, a long soft-leather pouch arched over the cantel of his 
saddle like a cavalryman's blanket-roll ; his long, shoe-shaped stirrups ; 
and usually a parasol or umbrella hanging at his side, if, indeed, it 
does not shade him as he rides. No Colombian caballero who aspires 
to retain his rank as such would venture to mount a horse while 
lacking any item of this equipment. One trembles to think what 
might happen to a caucano, needing to ride instantly for the doctor, 
who could not lay hands on his samarras, or who had mislaid his 
gloves. 

The Cauca was now a broad', dry, treeless region without streams, 
though little humped bridges lifted us across the waterless beds of 
what would be such at other seasons, and which still retained the name 
of " river " in local parlance. Arrieros of this section put red bands 
about the brows of their horses and mules, perhaps only for the pur- 
pose of identification, but giving the animals the coy appearance of 
coquettish girls. As we advanced, the long drought grew more and 
more in evidence. Across the sun-cracked valley floor lay scattered 
the bleached bones of scores of cattle that had died of thirst. Poli- 
carpo and I, falling behind, were in danger of suffering the same fate ; 

71 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

for the band of recruits, like another locust horde, drank the world 
ahead wholly dry. The rare hovels and amateur shops along the way 
were prepared to feed and minister to the thirst of only the customary 
few daily travelers; not to the ninety-four of us that suddenly de- 
scended upon them out of the north without warning. Hays and I 
were forced to stride on past the sponge-like avalanche of humanity 
for self-preservation. 

Here and there we got huge glasses of chicha, the favorite native 
beverage, at a cent or two each. So many travelers have pictured the 
making of this by toothless old women chewing yuca and spitting it 
into a tub to ferment, that the impression should be corrected at the 
outset. That custom does exist, but it is found only among the un- 
tamed tribes of the upper reaches of the Amazon, scarcely trodden 
by one in ten thousand South American travelers. All down the 
great Andean chain this nectar of the Incas is made chiefly of maize, 
though also of other grains, berries, and of almost any vegetable 
matter that will ferment, by just as agreeable processes as any other 
cooking operation of the same region. The notion of cleanliness is, 
at best, rudimentary among the country people of South America, yet 
the brewing of chicha certainly compares favorably with the ways 
of our average cider-mill. A well-made chicha, indeed, resembles 
somewhat in taste the best cider, and is the surest thirst-quencher I 
have yet encountered, distinctly superior in this respect to beer. 
Many were the chicha recipes I gathered along the Andes. For the 
interest of those who wish to temper a hot summer day with an ex- 
cellent heritage from the ancient Inca civilization, let me translate 
the most common one. 

" Chicha de morocho : 

Take hard, ripe corn " (morocho is one of the several excellent 
species of maize that, like certain grades of the potato, has never been 
carried from its original Andean habitat to the rest of the world) 
" shell, and boil for two hours. Let it cool, then grind, or crush 
under a stone, sprinkling from time to time with some of the water 
in which it has been boiled. Keep this mass in a well-covered jar. 
As it is needed, mix with water; one soupspoonful of the prepared 
mass to one liter of boiling water; add cloves, a very little vanilla, 
and as much sugar or rapadura as is considered necessary. Mix with 
an equal amount of cold water and place in jars to ferment. Once 
fermented, it is ready to serve." 

72 




Worse than the locusts was the flock of recruits that, until we outdistanced them, ate 

and drank up everything the amateur shops, tended by leprous old 

women, afforded along the way 




The market-place of Tulua, with the cross that protects it against all sorts of calamities- 
except those which befall it 



ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY 

We reached Zarzal, beyond a blistered, red-hot plain, soon after 
noon, with nineteen miles already behind us. It was thus we would 
always have arrived; the day's work done early in the afternoon, to 
wash, eat, and loaf awhile on the canvas cots in our cell-bare room; 
then to loll in the rawhide chairs on the broad tile-floored veranda 
before our door, reading the literature of the country, languidly 
watching the afternoon shower, and taking a stroll in the evening for 
exercise. In the Andes, however, the itinerary is subjected to a hap- 
hazard arrangement of stopping-places that make so ideal a plan 
impossible. We gave orders for dinner and supper upon our arrival. 
The ignorant, good-hearted old landlord literally hung over us as we 
ate, fingering our dishes and even our food. The place might, with 
entire justice, have advertised " personal services." At two we 
finished a heavy dinner. At three-thirty our host waddled in to 
announce that the " large supper " we had ordered was ready ! We 
managed to plead off until five, but for that concession were obliged 
to eat the meal cold as an abandoned hope. 

A heavy rain during the night — our coming seemed to have broken 
the long drought — made the going lead-heavy for the first few hours, 
until the blazing sun had dried up the " gumbo " mud. A richer 
region appeared as we advanced. Once or twice it seemed as if the 
central and western ranges were about to join hands and cut us off, 
but the " unmade " road always found a way through with, at most, 
an occasional dip, or a slight winding climb. During the hot after- 
noon we picked up a recruit straggler, complaining of fever. The 
entire company was scattered for miles along the valley, as often 
panting in a patch of shade as hobbling forward on their blistered, 
light-shod feet. Magnificent trees stood out here and there across 
the rich bottom lands. Often the way led through dense gaudales, 
bamboo groves that waved their gigantic plumes lazily in the summer 
air. Here and there the vegetation vaulted entirely over a " river " 
into which filtered only a few rays of sun, as through the roof of an 
abandoned ruin. Occasionally we came upon a chacra, a little farm 
with a tiny thatched hut faded with age, its floor of trampled earth, 
surrounded by coffee bushes, papaya, chirimoya, and other fruit trees 
of the tropics, the sometimes recently white-washed dwelling fur- 
nished only with a few crude leather stools, a wooden bench, a lame 
table, and a few cdntaros and dishes of native pottery. Pigs and 
chickens treated the family with perfect equality; under the trees 

73 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

meditated old donkeys, broken down by a life-time of toil under heart- 
less drivers. We were indeed approaching the scene of " Maria " in 
all its photographic detail. 

We prepared to leave Tulua early, but we reckoned without our 
host, who was a half-negro of nasty temper and stupid wit, and no 
faith in gold coin. Hays offered him a $5 gold piece in payment 
of our bill, but he demanded " paper of the country." We had none 
left, and a mulatto boy was sent out to change the scorned yellow 
metal. An hour elapsed without a second sight of him. When an- 
other had drifted into the past, a search party was organized. In- 
vestigation showed that the emissary had tried to change the coin 
in a couple of shops, and had then faded away. It was nearly noon 
when he reappeared, the coin still in his clenched hand. He had 
fallen into a game with other boys and " forgotten " his errand. 

We took the task upon ourselves. One after another drowsy, 
wondering shopkeepers looked the coin over as a great curiosity and 
handed it back, announcing that the changing would be " muy 
trabajoso " — " very laborious " — for the speaker, but that we could 
get it changed " en to'as partes " — " anywhere," which, as usual, meant 
nowhere. At last a merchant suggested that it would be changed 
wherever we bought anything. We called his bluff by picking out a 
notebook on his shelves, and had heaped up before us nearly $500 in 
ragged " billetes del pais " of chiefly one and five-peso values. The 
wad was burdensome, but to be caught on the road in the Andes with- 
out small money is often to go hungry, if not, indeed, thirsty. This 
particular shopkeeper prided himself on a knowledge of geography 
and the affairs of the " exterior," the outside world, above the average 
of his fellow-townsmen. As we turned away, he called after us : 

" By the way, do los sefiores come from New York, or from the 
United States?" 

It was a subtle distinction we had not, to that moment, recognized. 

The ancient city of Buga, one of the largest in the Cauca valley, 
was already familiar to us from the pages of " Maria." But seeing 
is too often disillusionment in these " cities " of the Andes, particu- 
larly those in which the imagination has already dwelt. To have 
seen one long, cobbled, unswept street of Buga was to have seen them 
all. Checkerboard in plan, the monotonous line of its continuous 
house-walls, all standing close to the street in a strict "right dress," 
broken here and there by a massive zaguan, stretched away out of 
sight in both directions. At first glimpse, it seemed unduly modest 

74 



ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY 

in claiming only ten thousand inhabitants ; when we found that every 
dwelling had a patio and a garden of its own within, we realized 
that a one-story Andean town is by no means so large as it looks. 
The place was stagnant as a frog-pond, its main plaza a splendid study 
in " still life." Yet Buga was old before Boston was founded, and is 
favored with a soil and climate superior to the best of New Eng- 
land. In a region where fruit should have been unlimited, the only 
shop that offered any for sale was slightly stocked with a few green 
samples. The old woman who kept it bestirred herself to finger 
over several of her wares, and advised us to come back mafiana 
or the day after when they had had time to ripen. Perhaps it is un- 
just to expect of Buga the energy and movement of a white man's 
town. At least it has unrivalled evenings in which, after the sun 
has set gloriously over the western range, the traveler can lean over 
the parapet of the massive old Spanish bridge of many arches — how 
the Spaniards built to stay, yet stayed not — watching a half-moon 
rise and listening to the chatter of the shallow, diamond-clear little 
Guadalajara de las Piedras that flanks the town on the south. 

Buga is a holy city. Far above all else bulks a modern Gothic 
church of real bricks — and bricks transported from overseas are 
not cheap — called " De los Milagros," filled wi^h more religious 
trophies than any Hindu temple. We were accosted in the nave by a 
long-unshaven priest who inquired our desires with a brusk " Que 
se le ofrece?" that plainly revealed his knowledge that we were not of 
the " faithful." His familiarity with the outside world was on a par 
with that of most Colombians. When we answered his question of 
nationality by announcing ourselves Americans, he replied compla- 
cently, " Ah, yes, Englishmen." Finding unheeded his strong hint to 
leave, he at length led the way up a ladder to a cell above and back 
of the altar. Here he lighted a candle and fell on his knees before 
the " miraculous " crucifix, the figure of which was smeared with red 
paint to simulate blood. Pilgrims flock to Buga from hundreds of 
miles around. To the buguefws themselves, however, their " miracle " 
seems to offer little more than a means of easy income, through the 
hawking of crucifixes and holy lithographs to their pious visitors. 

Like Puree, Benares, or Lourdes, the holy city is more holy at a dis- 
tance, than to those who loll through life in its shadows, and it was 
only at El Cerrito, a day's march beyond, that we heard the story 
of the Milagroso de Buga in all its details. In a faintly lighted corre- 
dor we sat with three old women, the natural authorities on such sub- 

75 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

jects, who told the tale in low, awed voices, their eyes glowing in the 
night with the miracle of it, their tongues breaking in frequently with 
a " Que le parece ! " — " What do you think of that ! " — as the 
miraculous recital proceeded. 

Long years ago, more than two centuries, when Buga was nothing 
but a row of thatched casitas on the bank of the babbling Guadalajara 
de las Piedras, a very poor and pious woman used to come every day 
to wash clothes at the river brink. The clothes of others, that is, for 
you must know that she had long been trying to get together sixty 
cents to buy a crucifix to set up in her hut, where she had nothing 
whatever to pray to. At last she economized the sixty cents and was 
toiling away on the bank of the Guadalajara, dreaming of the joy of 
setting up the crucifix in her casita on the morrow, when a poor lame 
man of Buga came by and told her he owed sixty cents to a rich 
caballero, and would be put in prison for debt if he did not pay it that 
very night. The poor washerwoman drew from within her garments 
the silver she had so carefully hidden away and gave it to the lame 
man to pay his debt. The next day — or three days later; here a 
great dispute arose among our informants — as the poor woman was 
washing and praying that she might some day gather together an- 
other sixty cents, there floated squarely into her open hands and mixed 
itself up with the garments — of others — she was washing, a cajita, 
a little box in which there was. . . . 

Only a simple little cross, the spokeswoman said, but she, having at 
that moment to step into the shop to sell two corn-and-cheese biscuits, 
the others assured us in hoarse whispers that this version was en- 
tirely erroneous ; it was not a simple cross, but a crucifix with a Cristo 
attached, just exactly the same that you see to-day in El Milagroso de 
Buga, only very tiny, chiquitito, in fact. This momentous point in 
Buga's history I am forced to leave unsettled, reporting merely what I 
heard half-whispered in the dark corredor of El Cerrito. The woman 
took this cross — or crucifix — home and set it up on the wall of 
her casita. To her surprise and alarm, the crucifix — or cross — 
began to grow. " Que le parece ! " It grew even during the night ! 
And the noises of its stretching kept her awake. When it had grown 
to twice its original size, she became so alarmed that she went and told 
the village curate. The padre scoffed at her story, saying such things 
were not possible nowadays — O ye of little faith ! — for miracles 
were no longer done. But when she showed him the thing, lo, it was 
even then growing ! So the priest took it away with him — as priests 

76 




A view of the "sacred, city " of Buga, with, the new church erected in honor of the 
miraculous Virgin 




A horseman of the Cauca in full regalia. In addition to his town garb, coat and all, he 
would be a social outcast who did not wear a " Panama " hat; gloves; a ruana, or 
poncho light in color and weight; zamarras, or false trouser-legs of rubber- 
canvas, and chilenas, or huge wheeWike spurs. His other possessions 
he carries in his cuchugos, the long, soft-leather pouch on his cantel; 
and inserts his feet in heavy, fancily carved 
brass shoe-stirrups 



ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY 

will — and still it grew. It grew until it reached the size you see it 
to-day in El Milagroso de Buga. Then the padre had an intimation 
from the Blessed Virgin that a church should be built on the spot 
where the cajita had been found, and he called all the people to- 
gether to build it. They put the miracle behind the altar, and there 
it remained more than two hundred years, in the church which is 
to-day the carpenter-shop beside El Milagroso. Then, in 1902, the 
great temple of bricks was raised, for it had long been that those 
who would worship and be cured by the Miraculous One could not 
get into the old church. And the Milagroso was moved to the new 
temple as easily as if it were a mere image of wood, though all the 
world well knows that it moves only when it wishes, and if it does 
not, all the horses in the Cauca cannot stir it. 

" And is it true that El Milagroso has cured many invalids ? " I 
asked. 

All three exploded in the Colombian manner of expressing great 
world-wide truths, such as, " Is Buga larger than Tulua ? " " Is it 
colder in Zarzal than in El Cerrito?" Why. . . . 

But from an embarrassment of proofs of the miraculous power of 
the Milagroso of Buga, I have space only for this: 

A woman of Sonson had been bed-ridden with rheumatism for 
twenty years. At last, when they had grown large enough, her sons 
carried her to Buga and placed her in a chair before El Milagroso. 
As she prayed, she leaned forward and touched the toe of the Mirac- 
ulous One, whereupon she at once rose up from her chair perfectly 
well and walked home to Sonson, many miles away. That, every one 
in the Cauca valley knows, for it happened only the other year. 

" And also," put in another of the old women, bent on rounding out 
the story, " El Milagroso can turn a woman young and beautiful 
again, back to the day of her marriage and the age of fifteen." 

" Eh ! " began Hays, sitting up, " Then why . . . But, no, the ques- 
tion would be unkind. It is too personal." 

It was in El Cerrito that we first began inquiries about Jorge 
Isaacs. Those who have sought information of Carlyle in Chelsea, or 
of Goethe in Frankfurt will be surprised to know that the people of El 
Cerrito had heard of the author of " Maria," though the corner chicha- 
seller and his neighbors spoke of him with something of the scorn 
active men of the world always feel for mere men of letters, even 
though they were not averse to basking in the sunshine of his fame. 
Some one led us to the little bridge below which the village gossips 

77 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

and washes its scanty clothes, and pointed away to the east. Far across 
the valley, on the lower skirts of the central range, we could see plainly 
the " novela casa " — " the story house," a mere white speck on the 
distant mountain flank. 

There were few spots in Colombia to which I had looked forward 
with more interest than this scene of South America's greatest novel, 
and the life-long home of its author. With the first graying of the 
night I was astir, and we were off by sunrise along a grass-grown trail 
at right angles to our route to Ecuador. Several times this seemed to 
lose its way, and split up in hopeless indecision. But the " house of 
my fathers," gleaming steadily on the skirt-hem of the central range, 
piloted us forward. The only building to be seen, except those on the 
floor of the plain, it stood just high enough to gaze out across the 
great valley, a single evergreen tree, slender as a church-spire, close 
beside it. The sun shot down its rays as if bent on setting on fire all 
that the foliage of the trees did not defend from its rage, when we 
came to the edge of the plain, broken by ravines in which we sepa- 
rated in an attempt to keep together. There was nothing left but to 
strike an unmarked course for the goal. My own soon plunged down 
into a gully hundreds of feet deep, thick in jungle, a stream, the Za- 
baletas of " Maria," monologing at its bottom. I wandered long be- 
side it before I could tear my way across, and longer still before I 
found the suggestion of a path by which to climb out again. Beyond 
were slightly sloping brown fields, with grazing herds and immense 
black rocks protruding from the soil, and behind, the indistinct, prairie- 
like valley, majestic and silent, stretched mile upon mile to the deep- 
blue wall of the Western Cordillera. Over the crest of the Andes 
above hung, like an immense veil, dense masses of fog, from which the 
winds of the Sierra above snatched rags of clouds that floated lazily 
away to the westward. Then, all at once, the modest little white house 
appeared close at hand, in a grove of evergreens backed by the yarumo- 
dotted mountain flank. I climbed a stone wall and, mounting through 
another brown field, pushed open a heavy rustic gate, to find myself 
at last at the home of " Maria." 

A woman of olive complexion, with streaming hair — for in this 
corner of the Cauca, far from the " royal highway," travelers, to say 
nothing of foreigners, are rare, indeed — watched me in speechless 
amazement as, dripping with twelve miles of struggle, I mounted the 
steps of the house. On the veranda I was met by a veritable delega- 
tion of women and children, headed by a man who announced himself 

78 



ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY 

as Camilo Duran, hacendado, entirely at my service. The family was 
of the well-to-do farmer class of the Cauca, a bit awkward, yet proud 
of their rank in society, lightly clad in rural dress, and decidedly ex- 
cited at the extraordinary event of a visit by a foreigner from far-off 
Europe — or America — who presented a document from the alcalde 
of Bogota, signed by none other than the nephew of that same " Don 
Jorge " for whom their home was famous. A wide-eyed negro boy 
whom one might have taken for " Juan Angel " in person, his woolly 
head protruding through the crown of what had long since been a na- 
tive straw hat, came running with a chair. As I sat down in the 
cool corredor, surrounded by the admiring family, Duran called for 
glasses and a bottle, and just then Hays' head appeared above the stone 
fence of the inner corral and his always leisurely legs brought him up 
the steps to be introduced as that very " Lay-O-Ice " whom the valued 
communication from Bogota mentioned — when read by natives. The 
aguardiente, which was " ardent water " indeed, arrived a moment 
later, and when Duran had drunk our health and we his, we turned to 
look about us. Would we see la novela casaf We would, indeed, and 
rising, entered it. 

The " story house " was a more modest dwelling than the imagina- 
tion pictures during the reading of " Maria." But then, all the Cauca 
and its ways and people are simple and unassuming to the American 
point of view. Typical of the hacienda houses of the region, it was 
of one story, arranged with due regard for the natural resources and 
the needs of the place and climate. Built of stone and adobe, it gave 
evidence of being periodically disguised under a coating of whitewash. 
The long, deep veranda was flanked by two corner rooms and, like 
them, floored with what the French call dalles, dull-red tiles that re- 
mained cool even at Cauca noonday. Its thick walls were shaded by 
a low, projecting tile roof. Over the entrance — a genuine Latin- 
American touch — had been painted in what Hays referred to as " box- 
car letters " the information : 

" Aqui Canto y Lloro " Here Sang and Wept 

Jorge Isaacs " George Isaacs " 

The main hall, or parlor, took up the entire depth ot the house from 
the front to the back veranda, the " corredor de la montafia " of the 
novel, and was fitted with heavy hand-made furniture, of which an 
immense dining table of rough-hewn construction formed the center. 
Flanking this chief chamber were the half-dozen private rooms of 

79 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the family. That at the right-hand corner of the house, encroaching 
on the front corredor, had been the room of " Efrain," the hero, 
and of the novelist himself. Back of it came the sewing-room, the 
writer's picture of which was so photographic that we were almost 
startled not to find " Maria " and " Emma " and her mother busy with 
their sewing. At the back, across the main hall, stood the oratorio, 
a small chapel with the same simple image of the Virgin, perhaps, be- 
fore which " Maria " had so often prayed in vain for a happy life. 
Behind the back veranda stood a wing, barely connected with the house 
proper, with a kitchen, hive-shaped clay bake-ovens, and the staring 
white eyes of negro servants of all sizes that seemed gargoyle-like 
ornaments of the smoke-streaked and blackened place. The entire 
dwelling was as densely inhabited as a New York tenement. Besides 
the dozen boys and girls of olive tint and several women of the 
Duran family, servants and negroes swarmed, and piccaninnies peered 
from every opening and corner. 

The way led through the sewing-room across the now weedy garden 
to the " pila de Maria," a crystal-clear pool in the bed of the arroyo 
that sprang from rock to rock down the swift, light-wooded gorge at 
the foot of which the " story house " is situated. " Maria " with her 
unbound tresses, was no longer here ; instead, several dark-skinned boys 
snatched their garments as we approached and sought quick shelter. 
The " pila " was a rock-walled basin of sandy bottom, some four feet 
deep and as many times larger than the less romantic bathtub of 
civilization, constantly renewed by the stream that wanders languidly 
away across the valley of the Cauca. Because of the dip of the 
garden, the " pila " is out of sight from the house, but from his corner 
room " Efrain " could, even as the novelist has pictured, see the girls 
as they returned from their morning dip, pausing to pick a flower here 
and there along the way. Duran gave us leave to take a plunge. But 
though few things would have been more welcome after our dripping 
climb from El Cerrito, it would have seemed something verging on 
sacrilege, something like smoking a cigar with our feet on Juliet's bal- 
cony, to have profaned with our dusty, prosaic, vagabond forms the 
pool about which seemed still to flit the spirit of adorable " Maria." 

According to the people of the region, Colombia's chief novel is 
little more than the autobiography of its author, polished into the 
ideal love-story in vogue a half-century ago. Isaacs, like the hero 
" Efrain," was the son of an English Jew, born in Jamaica, who came 
to Colombia as a young man, married, and embraced Christianity. 

80 




The scene of " Maria, ' most famous of South American novels, and once the residence of its 

author. It lies some distance back from the camino real against the foothills 

of the Central Cordillera 




The home of " Maria"; and a typical hacendado family of the Cauca. The lettering over the 
door reads: "Here sang and wept Jorge Isaacs" 



ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY 

Like " Efrain," the author had a sister Emma, in real life the recently- 
deceased wife of a doctor of Popayan. " Carlos," who first offered 
his hand to " Maria," still lived on his hacienda a few miles out 
across the valley. " Juan Angel," the slave-boy of " Efrain," was 
said to be still living in Cali, an old, old man. The bear and tiger 
hunting, the country weddings, the simple and patriarchal household, 
the life and scenes of the Cauca, had all been things of reality, deftly 
lifted into the realms of the imagination by the hero-author. Even 
the evil stroke of fortune that had befallen the family on that dismal 
night in the " hacienda of the valley " was no story-book tale, but a 
stern fact that had left the novelist without patrimony and brought into 
the hands of strangers " the house of my fathers." 

We took our leave in the early afternoon, drifting down through 
sloping meadows past the great black rock to which " Maria " used 
to climb to watch for the return of " Efrain " from the valley, which 
here spreads out in all its rich expanse, magestic and silent, to the 
dim Western Cordillera. Hays, long lost in meditation, broke it at 
last to announce that he had found the end of his wanderings; that 
he would return to the Zone to earn a new " stake " and come back to 
end his days as the owner of the " novela casa." He was given to 
catching such enthusiasms — to have them die during the succeeding 
night. It was, indeed, the most splendid spot in all the magnificent 
Cauca valley, this simple dwelling set where it could see and be seen 
from untold leagues away, from the very crest of the western range, 
yet never standing forth boldly and conspicuously. Framed modestly 
among its evergreens, just a little way up the first easy slope of the 
Andean range that piles into the clouds behind it, it seemed as unas- 
suming and removed from the hubbub of the modern world as gentle 
" Maria " herself. All the day through our eyes were drawn back to it 
at frequent intervals, and as long as the light lasted it stood forth 
plainly in this clear air, though it shrunk to a house in miniature, then 
to a mere speck on the skirt-hem of the central range. 

All the hot afternoon we plodded onward. Some miles after falling 
in with the camino real again, we passed " La Manuelita," the " haci- 
enda of the valley " where Isaacs' father had set up a sugar factory 
while the son was still a student in Bogota, and where took place, both 
in the novel and real life, that pathetic scene that marked the ruin 
of the family. To-day the estate is the property of Russian-Ameri- 
cans, and its products are known throughout all Colombia. Beyond 
the little Amaime river the way led through a forest of bamboo, then 

81 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

across a monotonous and dusty despoblado. The great Cordillera 
Occidental, now like a badly wrinkled garment of sepia-brown hue, 
drew ever nearer, as did a line of bright-green trees marking the 
course of the Cauca river. The central range all but faded away in 
the east, leaving a broad expanse of fertile country longing for the 
plow. Further on, a broken bridge or two adorned a waterless 
stream, and an occasional ox-cart, the first thing on wheels we had 
seen since crossing the Magdalena, crawled by in the sand. The after- 
curse of African slavery was everywhere in evidence. In little cabins 
thrown together from jungle rubbish lounged swarms of ragged 
humanity, black or half-black in color. Yet somehow they seemed less 
lazy than in our own land, perhaps because the activity of their few 
lighter neighbors gave less contrast. Swift tropical night was spread- 
ing its cloak over all the Cauca when we sighted the sharp church-spire 
of Palmira, where we were soon housed in the well-named " Hotel 
Oasis." 

In midafternoon of the day following we broke out suddenly on the 
bank of the Cauca river. A barca, or ferry, moored to wires that 
sagged from shore to shore, set us across, and with sunset we plodded 
into Cali. Our arrival was well timed. The chief commercial city of 
the Cauca valley was en fete. From end to end, on the Sunday 
morrow of our entrance, the place was crowded with* happy, rather 
dusky, throngs, and gay with the chiefly yellow flag of the nation and 
the bishop's banner and mitre. For on that day the ancient church 
of Cali became a cathedral, and one of her " sons " a bishop ; dividing 
a territory ruled over for centuries by the chief ecclesiastic of Popa- 
yan. The name of the " hijo de Cali " about to don the purple blazed 
forth from the faqade of the church in enormous electric letters, like 
that of some Broadway star, and by sunset fully half the visible 
population was reeling drunk in honor of the honor that had fallen 
upon their native town. 

" What you don't look for in Cali, you won't find," runs a local prov- 
erb ; which is a Colombian way of saying that its shops offer for sale 
anything man may desire. In a small and Colombian sense this is true, 
except on those frequent occasions when the stock is exhausted. Con- 
nected with the Pacific port of Buenaventura by seven hours mule-back 
and four hours rail — it was hard to realize that we were again only 
four days from a Zone police station — the place is in more or. less 
constant connection with the outside world. But the transportation 
facilities of the country are so lax that the merchants of Cali are ac- 

82 



ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY 

customed to announce the receipt of a shipment from Europe or 
America with a sarcastic placard: 

" por fin llegaron!" (At last they have arrived.) 

The city's role is chiefly that of distributing center for the vast 
territory about and behind it, and on the heels of this first announce- 
ment appears on the chief shop fronts the information, of interest only 
to arrieros and the owners of mule-trains : 

" hay carga para — There is a load for " this or that town of the 
interior. 

Life in Cali is largely governed by placards, as if she had but re- 
cently discovered the art of printing and were making the most of it. 
Hardly an establishment but is adorned with its set of rules. Among 
those of our hotel were two of purely Latin- American tone : 

" Correct dress is required of anyone presenting himself in the salons 
of this establishment. 

" All political or religious discussion is absolutely prohibited." 

Among the orders to the sepultero of the local cemetery were sev- 
eral that reflected the customs of the place : 

" i. Receive no corpse without a ticket from a priest. 

2. Keep three or four graves ready dug for bodies that may present 
themselves. 

3. Make each adult grave iy 2 meters deep and one wide. Relatives 
may, upon request, have it dug deeper. 

4. Remove no bodies without the permission of an inspector or a 
priest." 

Why was man, whose enjoyment surely would be so much greater, 
denied the power of sailing freely out over the earth, as the birds circled 
away across the great valley of the Cauca, tinged to sepia in the 
oblique rays of the setting sun? When I reached the modest height 
that stands so directly over Cali that I could count every dull-red tile 
of its roofs, the little river racing over its rocks below was still alive 
with bathers and laundresses. A breeze from off the mountains lifted 
the drooping leaves of the palm-trees of the city; beyond, lay a view 
of the entire Cauca valley, clear across to the now hazy central chain 
of the Andes, the dot that to whoever has known " Maria " will ever 
remain " the house of my fathers " plainly in sight, as were many of 
the scenes back to Cartago and on over the range toward Bogota that 
I should never again see, except in imagination. If only this magnifi- 
cent valley, climate and all, were in our land! Or, no; it is better 

83 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

as it is. For then there would be spread out here in the sunset a great 
colorless stretch of plowed fields, factories sooting the peerless Cauca 
heavens with their strident industry ; there these velvety hillsides would 
be covered with the gaudy villas of the more " successful " of an ac- 
quisitive race; a great, ugly American city of broken and distressing 
skyline, without a single dull-red roof, would cover the most feature- 
less, because the most " practical," part of the valley, utterly destroy- 
ing the beauty of a landscape which nature is still left to decorate in 
her own inimitable fashion. 



84 



CHAPTER V 

DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

FROM Cali a broad " road," still fresh with early morning, led 
forth to the southeast, skirting some foothills of the Western 
Cordillera. Really a meadow, bounded by two cactus hedges 
and interwoven with an intricate network of paths, like the tracks of 
some great railway terminal, it was excellent for tramping. Birds 
sang merrily in the branches of the scattered trees; a telegraph wire 
sagged southward from bamboo pole to pole. Groups of ragged 
women, balancing easily on their heads a machete, a coiled rope, and a 
rolled straw mat, were already off to gather Cali's daily firewood. 
Others we met market-bound, bearing, likewise on their heads, loads 
of a large leaf that serves as wrapping paper in the shops of the 
town. Here passed a man leading two pigs — except on those fre- 
quent occasions when the leadership was reversed — there a haughty 
horseman, and beyond, mule after donkey laden with everything from 
milk to alfalfa. We strode lightly forward this time, for the develop- 
ing-tank had been turned over to a " drummer " from Chicago, bound 
to Ecuador by sea. 

Before long the character of the country began to change, with a 
promise of mountains to climb far ahead in the hazy day-after-to- 
morrow. Mud-holes appeared ; streams without bridges, though often 
with stepping-stones or the trunk of a bamboo thrown across them, 
grew frequent, and the sky took to muttering ominously far off to the 
eastward. A strong young river, bright yellow in color and flecked 
with spume, sped by beneath the first roofed bridge, with news of last 
night's storm somewhere up in the Cordillera. Before the day was 
done we had several times to strip to the waist to ford torrents that 
had decorated themselves with leaves and flowers and the branches of 
trees snatched along the way. 

Next morning the foothills began to crowd in upon the trail, now a 
haphazard hunted thing scurrying in and out over lomas and knolls 
and ever higher hills, from the tops of which we several times caught 
what we fancied was the last view of the great Cauca valley behind 

»5 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

us. Slowly the mountains themselves closed in. We waded a river, 
toiled up a long slope, and came out far above a beautiful little vale 
completely boxed in by perpendicular hillsides. Only two houses were 
to be seen on its grassy floor, spotted with scores of grazing cattle. 
Over it, several hundred feet above, hung a broad column of locusts, 
surely a mile long, moving slowly northward with a humming whirr 
that we could plainly hear far beyond, and shading the country be- 
neath like some enormous veil. Beyond, we descended again to the 
Cauca river. Here there was no ferry, or rather, it was out of order. 
Tons of merchandise lay heaped along the bank, while cursing arrieros 
chased their snorting mules into the stream. The negro who set us 
across in a long dugout collected five billetes each for the service, but 
this was evidently exorbitant, for the woman of his own color who 
went with us paid only four green plantains for herself, a piccanniny, 
and her load. 

Luckily we had a long draught of chicha fuerte before facing the 
notorious subida de Aguache on the third day, for the stories we had 
long heard of this fearsome climb had not been exaggerated. High 
above anything we had seen since passing the Quindio, we came out 
suddenly on a " platform " on the edge of one of those bottomless 
ravines that abound in the Andes, a mighty hole in the earth, blue with 
the very depths of it. Just across, at the same height, hung in plain 
sight the wavering trail we could only reach by undoing all the climb- 
ing of days past and doing it all over again in one single task. Hour 
after hour we descended a mountainside so sheer that the struggle 
against gravity was like a battle with some hardy wrestler, only to face 
at the bottom what seemed the full unbroken wall of the Andes, the 
red trail zigzagging into the very sky above. All the blazing after- 
noon we climbed incessantly, to gain at evening a height equal to that 
of the morning, only a few miles further south. A task that would 
have seemed impossible a month earlier struck us now as amply re- 
warded by the indescribable panorama of mountains that spread away 
from the summit in every direction. 

For once the trail held for a time the advantage it had gained, pass- 
ing through Buenos Aires and Morales, two-row towns of thick adobe 
walls. Though still in the tropics, we were now in the temperate 
zone. Oaks abounded, and the weather was like that of our northern 
states in early autumn. The population was still dark in color, but 
negroes had faded away with the open-work architecture of the Cauca. 
For the first time since descending from the plateau of Bogota we met 

86 



DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

full-blooded Indians. They were of the Guajiro tribe, dull-brown of 
color, sturdy, thick-legged fellows in white pa jama-like garments reach- 
ing only to the knees. All, male or female, young or old, greeted us 
in a sing-song as we passed. 

On the last of August, four days from Cali, we pushed more swiftly 
forward, for we were nearing the famous old city of Popayan. A 
forced march, dipping down through a mighty gully and panting up- 
ward through swirling dust, brought us at noon to the dry and wind- 
swept hilltop village of Cajibio. The population was almost entirely 
Indian, and the dusty central square swarmed with the Saturday 
market. Guajiros of both sexes and all ages, flocked into town from 
scores of miles around, sat with their bits of produce under woven- 
reed shelters, or in the open glare of the equatorial sun. Some had 
already exchanged their wares for the weekly chicha debauch, and stag- 
gered about maudlin and red-eyed, or lay tumbled in noisome corners. 
The village priest, the only visible resident of European blood, 
wandered in and out among the hawkers with a mochila on the end of 
a rod over one shoulder. Gazing away across the sepia hills and distant 
blue ranges, as if his mind were utterly detached from this world, the 
padre paused before each hawker, turned his back, and punched him — 
or, more often, her — with the end of the stick until a contribution to 
the parochial larder had been dropped into the sack. 

The sun set amid corn-fields, wrapping itself in grayish-purple clouds 
in the crimsoning west, and still Popayan was leagues away. We 
plodded on into the night. There is, however, a sort of reflected light 
in these high altitudes, where the very mountains seem low hills, a 
sense of being on top of the world, with the sun just out of sight 
around the curve of the earth. Fires, evidently of Indians burning off 
their chacras, dotted the night on several sides of us. The road grew 
broader and took on that atrocious cobbling which follows the Spaniard 
everywhere, growing worse as it approaches a town. Now it stumbled 
down to a river, across a long stone bridge of the massive type of long 
ago, and into a two-row village. For a time we imagined we saw at 
last the lights of the famous city. It was mere illusion. Not only 
did we tramp another footsore hour, but when we did finally arrive, 
there were no lights. The place had grown up about us in the dark be- 
fore we realized that we were no longer in the open country. The 
pedometer registered 35 miles, and our feet and appetites several times 
that, when we halted undecided in what some sixth sense told us was 
the central plaza. 

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VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

Most famous of all the cities from Bogota to Quito, boasting itself 
a " cradle of savants," long the capital of a large section of Spain's 
American colonies and still that of the great department of the Cauca, 
Popayan had seemed to promise at least the lesser comforts of civiliza- 
tion. For days we had slept on tables and mud benches, wrapped in the 
fond hope of making up here for the cold, hungry nights on the trail. 
We had even feared there might be difficulty in choosing from a 
plethora of accommodations, and had gravely set down, somewhere to 
the north, the name of the " Hotel Colon " as of about the grade of 
luxury fitted to our fortunes. It was to laugh. Though it was barely 
eight in the evening, Popayan was as dead as a graveyard at midnight 

— and darker. Later we learned that the famous city does have lights, 

— a few street-corner kerosene lamps that burn out within an hour, 
unless a puff of wind blows them out first. Having been a city, in 
the Spanish sense, only 376 years, it was too much to expect the place 
to have learned already of the existence of electricity. 

We hobbled over slippery cobblestones along monotonous two-story 
streets and in and out of dimly-seen thatched suburbs for what seemed 
hours before we caught a man emerging from a candle-lighted barber- 
shop. 

" Hotel ? " he ruminated, as if striving to recall a word he had heard 
somewhere long ago, " You want a hotel ? " 

" No, you Spiggoty dolt," growled Hays in English, nursing his 
blistered feet by standing on one at a time, " We only asked that be- 
cause we wanted to know who won the pennant this year." 

" Hotel," went on the musing popayanejo, unheeding, " Ah-er-where 
do you come from and where are you going? You will be italianos? 
Alemanes? " 

" No, we 're Chinamen," I snapped, " and looking for a hotel." 

" Pues, Sefior Chino," he replied, cleverly returning the sarcasm, 
" There is no hotel in Popayan. But if you go down this street four 
cuadras in this direction and three in that and knock at the door of the 
second house beyond the fountain, you may find them willing to give 
you lodging." 

They were not, however; nor were those to whom they in turn di- 
rected us. A long hour more we winced along the uneven, slippery 
streets of Popayan, begging for a bite to eat and a plank to lie on as in 
any Indian village, only to be turned away from some of the most dis- 
tressing holes ever man offered to sleep in on a wager. But the 
Spanish-speaking races have a proverb that " Perro que anda hueso 

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DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

encuentra," and we stumbled finally upon a billiard-room in which sev- 
eral young bloods of the town were upholding their reputation as night- 
hawks. One Sefior Fulano, cigarette-maker by profession — when he 
was sober enough — and " dope-fiend " by habit, as were several of his 
companions, took us in charge and led the way uncertainly to a cubby- 
hole of a room in his barn-like ancestral home. There, my dreams of 
the comforts of Popayan forever shattered, I resigned myself to sleep 
once more on a wooden table posing as a bed. Hays was little more 
fortunate, for though he drew an aged divan, he fell asleep quite liter- 
ally several times before he abandoned himself to the floor which fate 
seemed bent on forcing him to occupy. 

In the morning Fulano's garrulous old mother made more formal 
arrangements for our housing. She did not pretend to run a hotel — 
though she had no hesitancy in charging hotel rates — but she served 
two greasy meals a day to several clerks from the government offices 
and, " out of charity," seated us with them. But alas, however easily 
he may spend the day, the Latin-American leads a hard life at night. 
In a huge and all but empty front room was an enormous bedstead of 
viceregal days; but this, too, was wooden floored, and the diaphanous 
straw-mat that did duty as mattress had had all life crushed out of it 
years before. Nor did the single blanket have much influence over 
the penetrating mountain air of early morning. The deep window em- 
brasures were built with steps for the use of occupants who would en- 
gage in the favorite popayanejo pastime of gazing out through the 
reja; but no provision whatever had been made for another con- 
venience essential to all well-regulated households. In this respect the 
house was on a par with all the rest of the famous city. 

" Founded " by Benalcazar, in the Spanish sense of having a scribe 
record under a name bristling with reference to the saints — which as 
usual failed to stick — an Indian town ruled over by a warlike cacique 
named Payan, the capital of the Cauca has, according to its latest cen- 
sus, 4326 men and 5890 women, a disproportion that is reflected in its 
customs. If its own assertion is to be taken at par, it is " notable for its 
fine climate and its illustrious sons." Of the climate there can be little 
criticism. Just how illustrious its sons might have been in a wider 
world no one who has come to see where and how they lived can be 
blamed for wondering. Of them all, the town is evidently most proud 
of Caldas — a statue of whom adorns the central plaza — the tobacco- 
chewing savant who discovered how to determine altitude by boiling 
water — no one who has cooked his eggs in the Andes is long in mak- 

89 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

ing the same discovery — and who taught the revolted colonials how to 
make gunpowder — only to be shot in Bogota for his pains. 

So aged is the town that it has not a red roof left ; all are faded to 
a time-dulled maroon. The place bristles with ancient religious edi- 
fices, mementoes of its importance in colonial days. Hardly a block 
is there without its huge church of cavernous and dilapidated interior. 
The silent grass-grown little " Universidad del Cauca," of the aspect 
of some bent and toothless old man, is famous now only for its age, 
though in its dotage it fondly fancies itself still one of the principal 
seats of learning in the New World. Over its unadorned main door 
may still be read a crumbled inscription : 

" Initium Sapientae 
Timor Domini " 

Summer vacation had left it uninhabited, but there was evidence of 
practical training in at least one respect, — the beds of its dormitory 
were narrow wooden boxes some five feet long. 

If Popayan is dead by night, little more can be said for it by day. 
Languid shopkeeping is almost its only visible industry, and the 
population seems to live on what they sell one another. The ways of 
its merchants are typical of those in all the somnolent towns of the 
Andes. With few exceptions they treat the prospective purchaser in 
a manner that seems to say, " Buy at this price, or go away and let me 
alone. I want to read last week's newspaper, finish my cigarette, and 
day-dream, and I don't want you here in my store disturbing my medi- 
tations." Too often, in the shops, the manana habit prevails, — in that 
it is always the next place that has what you are looking for. The 
mortality of white ones being high on Andean trails, I entered a tienda 
to ask: 

"Do you sell blue handkerchiefs, sefior?" 

Shopkeeper, recovering from what was really a sleep, though osten- 
sibly awake : " Ah — er — buenos dias, seiior. Como esta uste ' ? 
Como esta la f amilia ? The seiior wishes — er — ah — what was it 
the sefior requested ? " 

The chances always are that he has heard the question in his dreams 
and, if given time, will recall it: 

" Handkerchiefs, is it not, sefior? " 

" Blue handkerchiefs, please." 

"Ah — er — como para que cosa? (What for, for instance?) 

This question, which is seldom lacking, being ignored, the shop- 

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DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

keeper turned to let his eyes wander dreamily over his shelves, striving 
in vain to bring his attention down to the matter in hand. Finally he 
took a stick from a corner and fished from an upper shelf a paper- 
wrapped bundle. Opened, it disclosed a half-dozen pairs of faded red 
socks, made in Germany. 

" But I said. ..." 

Shopkeeper, suddenly, but not unexpectedly, without a pause be- 
tween the questions : " Where do you come from where are you go- 
ing? " 

The traveler answers according to his character and mood. Mean- 
while the merchant had fished down a bundle of red handkerchiefs. 

" I said blue, sefior." 

" But this is blue, a beautiful ultramarine blue, mira uste ' — just 
look," and he held it up to the reflected sunlight that streamed in at the 
only opening to the shop, — the doorway. 

" No, sefior, I want blue." 

Shopkeeper, dreamily, " Ah, sefior, no hay — there are none. But 
you can find them en to 'as partes — anywhere. You are French, 
perhaps, sefior ? " 

" Perhaps." Here I caught sight of a bundle of blue handkerchiefs 
in plain view on a lower shelf, and pointed them out. " How much ? " 

Shopkeeper : ' 'Te — Fifteen pesos, sefior." 

" You must take me for a tourist, or a gringo. I '11 give you five." 

" Very well, sefior, muchas gracias, buenos dias, adios pues." 

Or perhaps the stranger wishes to visit some local celebrity and 
pauses in a shop-door to ask : 

" Can you tell me where Dr. Medrano lives ? " 

" You mean Dr. Medrano de Pisco y Miel? " — That is the only Dr. 
Medrano in town, as the merchant well knows, but the matter must 
be clothed in all customary formality — " His house is the second 
door beyond that of Dr. Enrique Castro y Pelayo, sefior." 

" Yes, but I am a stranger in town and I don't know where Don 
Enrique lives." 

" You don't know ? You don't know where Dr. Enrique Castro y 
Pelayo lives ! Why — er — but everyone knows the house of Dr. 
Enrique. Why — er — just ask anywhere. They can tell you en to' as 
partes — * anyone can tell you." 

This happy-go-lucky way of life is not without its advantages. Hav- 
ing occasion to cash a traveler's check, I dropped in upon a native mer- 
chant who played at being a banker. After the usual extended form- 

91 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

alities, he took the check and looked it over with a puzzled expression, 
for he knew no English. 

" As a banker you are, of course, familiar with the system of travel- 
er's checks ? " I put in. 

" No, senor, I have never before seen one." 

" Well, it is just as good as money and. . . ." 

" Oh, of course," he replied, hastily, " since the senor offers it. 
How much do you want for it ? " 

" Only its face value ; ten dollars in American money." 

" I shall be pleased to take it. How much is that in our money of 
the country ? " 

" Only a thousand pesos, senor," I replied, disdaining the tempta- 
tion to multiply by ten. 

" Muy bien, senor," he replied, and making out an order to his cashier 
for that amount, tucked the check away in a drawer. 

" It is not good unless I sign it," I suggested. 

" Ah, no ? " he asked, producing it again for that purpose, " A thou- 
sand thanks. Pues, adios, senor. Until we meet again." 

So unlimited is the faith in " ingleses " in these regions that he had 
no hesitancy in accepting from a stranger a check which he would not 
have dreamed of cashing for one of his fellow townsmen without ample 
proof of its value. 

One evening three men in frock-coats and the manners of prime 
ministers dropped in upon us and announced themselves editors of the 
newspaper " Sursum." They had only an hour or two to spare, how- 
ever, and by the time the introductory formalities were over they bowed 
themselves out with the information that they would come and tertn- 
liar (interview) us — mafiana. Two days later I chanced to meet one 
of them again. 

" Did you say ' Sursum ' is published every week ? " I asked, having 
had no visual evidence of its existence since our arrival. 

" Oh, yes, indeed ! " cried the editor, rolling another cigarette, 
" Every week. Ah — that is, last week it did not appear, it is true ; 
and the week before the editor-in-chief was al campo, and the week be- 
fore that he was very busy, as his sister was getting married. But it is 
sure to come out next week, or if not, then the week after. And I am 
myself coming to interview you — mafiana." 

It was in Popayan that we found coca leaves for sale for the first 
time, and met Indians whose cheeks were disfigured by a cud of them. 
Long before the white man appeared on his shores, the Indian of the 

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DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

Andes, unacquainted with the tobacco of his North American brother, 
was addicted to this habit. The leaves — from which is extracted the 
cocaine of modern days — are plucked from a shrub not unlike the 
orange in appearance, that grows down in the edge of the hot lands to 
the east of the Andean chain. Once dried, they are packed in huge 
bales, or crude baskets made on the spot, and sold in the marketplaces 
by old women who weigh out the desired amount in clumsy home-made 
scales, or in handfuls by eye measure. The Indians thrust the leaves 
one by one into their mouths, and as they become moistened, add a bit 
of lime or ashes, dipped with what looks like an enlarged toothpick from 
a tiny calabash which, with a leather pouch for the leaves themselves, 
constitutes the most indispensable article of the aboriginal equipment. 
How harmful the habit may be, it is hard to gage. Its devotees are, it 
is true, languid of manner and slow of intellect ; but they show no great 
contrast in this particular from the "gente decente," their neighbors* 
who rarely indulge in the leaves, except on some long and wearisome 
journey. So marked is this languor in Popayan that, as in most 
Andean towns, brawls are rare, despite the half-anarchy that reigns. 
Youths merry with liquor or its equivalent raced their horses up and 
down the roughly cobbled streets, forcing them to capriole until Hays 
took to cursing his loss of police powers ; street women may, — though 
few find it necessary — ply their profession as openly as vegetable 
hawkers. Even when a dispute grows noisy, there is no interference. 
A policeman may wander up in curiosity, like any other bystander, but 
he is almost sure to find that the contender is some " authority," or the 
second cousin of the alcalde, or a grandson of the bishop, or wears a 
white collar, and wanders away again, lest he get himself into trouble. 

So we remained in Popayan until it had dwindled from the romantic 
city of the past our imaginations had pictured to the miserable reality 
— though in after years, veiled by the haze of memory, its charm and 
romance may return — and one evening asked to have our coffee served 
at a reasonable hour in the morning. 

" Siempre se van hoy ? " cried our hostess, when we appeared in 
road garb next morning, " You are really going to-day ? " It was not 
so much that she was striving to cover her failure to have the coffee 
ready; her Latin- American mind could not conceive of so definite a 
resolution outliving the night. " Why do you not remain until to- 
morrow and rest ? " she rambled on. 

An hour later she stood staring after us from her doorway, an act 
in no way conspicuous, since all that section of Popayan was similarly 

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VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

engaged. The entire town had expressed its sympathy that we must go 
"all alone and so laboriously — tan trabajoso " over the wild moun- 
tains and valleys to — well, wherever we were bound ; for not a single 
popayanejo took seriously our assertion that we really hoped to reach 
Ecuador. 

Pasto was said to be something like a week distant " by land," and 
the route " very dangerous," though from what source was not clear. 
For the first lazy hour a good road led gradually upward. But like an 
incorrigible small boy getting out of sight of home, its good behavior 
ceased at the hilltop where we caught the last view of the " cradle of 
savants." Ever more winding and broken, across ravines and streams 
with bridges and without them, now and then seeming to drop com- 
pletely out of the world about us, only to gather its forces again far 
below and scramble to even greater heights over a saddle of a moun- 
tain wall beyond, from the summit of which the trail of twenty-four 
hours before stood forth as clearly as across an alleyway between 
tenement houses, it struggled uncertainly southward day after day. 
At the hamlet of Dolores, amid rugged and tumbled mountains piled 
into the sky on every hand, we came to a parting of the ways and had 
the choice of continuing by the temperate or the torrid zone. One 
route went down into the Patia valley, hotter than Panama, reputed the 
abode of raging fevers and the breeding-place of those swarms of 
locusts that devastate the Cauca. The other, by way of " los pueblos," 
lay cool and high, with frequent towns, though it was two days longer 
and much more broken and mountainous. 

We chose the temperate zone. The way turned back for a time al- 
most the way we had come, then climbed until a whole new world 
opened out beyond, towering peaks piercing the clouds and strangely 
shaped masses of earth lying heaped up tumultuously on every hand. 
For once the trail showed unusual intelligence in clinging to the top 
of the ridge, fighting its own natural tendency to pitch down into the 
mighty valleys on either side, and the constant struggle of the ridge 
to throw it off, like an ill-tempered bronco its rider. We were follow- 
ing now what the Colombian calls a cttchillo, a " knife," treading the 
very edge of its blade. Along it, miserable mud huts were numerous ; 
and every Indian we met had a cheek distorted and his teeth and 
lips discolored by a coca cud. It struck us as strange that even bad 
habits have their local habitat and that the magnificent mountain 
scenery gave the dwellers no inspiration to better their conditions. 

Evidently the region held foreigners in great fear. As often as we 

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DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

paused to ask for lodging, some transparent excuse was trumped up to 
get rid of us. The naivete of the inhabitants was amusing. At one 
village hut two women met our plea for posada with : 

"No, sefiores, los maridos no estan " (the husbands are out). 

" We are not interested in the husbands, but in a place to sleep." 

" Yes, but the husbands will be out all night and they would make 
themselves very ugly" (se pondrian muy bravos). Further on my 
companion tried his luck again. Two plump girls, not unattractive in 
appearance, bade him enter. Could they give us posada? They 
thought so ; mother usually did, but she was out just then. 

" All right," said Hays, sitting down, " I '11 wait for her." 

Some time had passed when it occurred to him to ask : 

" When will mother be back ? " 

" Oh, perhaps in a week," answered the innocent damsels, " She went 
to Moj arras with a load of corn." 

It was as useless to try to get a meal without the loss of several 
hours as to hope to eat it without the entire village squatted around 
us. Either there was nothing to cook, or no pan to cook it in, until the 
woman next door had baked to-morrow's corn-bread, or the stick fire 
in the back-yard refused to burn, or some other unsurmountable draw- 
back developed. Hays constantly labored under the delusion that 
money could expedite matters, and was given to drawing forth his 
worldly wealth in one wad to flourish it before the languorous cook and, 
incidentally, all the gaping town. The result was often a doubled or 
trebled price, if not an inducement for some of the village louts to 
lay in ambush for us somewhere up the trail, but never an earlier 
meal. If they could stir up their lethargy to serve us at all, it would 
be only at their own good leisure, whatever the price. Many a time 
there occurred a scene similar to that at San Miguel. Hays shook a 
$50 billete in the face of a bedraggled Indian woman who had, perhaps, 
never before seen so large a sum at one time, offering it all if she 
would prepare a meal at once. She would not, but after long argu- 
ment served coffee, corn-cakes, and eggs — which might easily rank 
as a meal in the Andes — and collected a bill of seven cents. 

For days at a time we tramped " aguas arriba." The trails of the 
Andes are fond of this means of crossing a mountain range. High 
above it we caught the gorge of a river, and wound upstream in and 
out along the towering wall that shut us in. It was no mountain-flank- 
ing road of easy gradient, such as abound in the Alps, but one that had 
chiefly built itself ; so that all day long we climbed and descended stony 

95 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

buttresses of the range, until they grew like the constant nagging of a 
querulous old woman, the gorge of the brawling river ever far below. 
Here and there a hut and clearing hung on the opposite mountain wall, 
or above us, in places where plows were useless. The Indians culti- 
vated their " farms " by burning off a bit of the swift slope, threw a 
brush fence about it, dropped their seeds into carelessly dug holes, and 
sat back to wait for whatever nature chose to send them. At length, 
in the course of days, the trail having kept the same general level, the 
diminished river rose to meet it; for hours more the path jumped back 
and forth across the ever smaller stream, until this had dwindled to a 
mere brook racing down a rocky gorge from its birth-place up under 
the snows. Then, when there was nothing else left for it, the trail 
girded up its loins and scrambled alone up out of the valley and over 
the backing range. 

Far above I could make out the rough-hewn wooden cross that 
marked the summit, masses of clouds scurrying past it, as if pursued by 
some enemy beyond. Once I passed a half-wild Indian girl with a baby 
on her back, who ran away down an unmarked, break-neck place in a 
way to suggest that she had taken me for the Fiend in person. No 
doubt the resemblance was striking. Higher still, two or three groups 
of the same tribe came down at a queer little dog-trot, the heavy loads 
on their backs supported by a shawl knotted across their shoulders, the 
plump breasts of the women undulating under their dirty, one-piece 
garments. In midmorning we stood at last on the summit of the 
famous Ahorcado — the Hanged Man — range, so named from some 
episode of the Conquest, a " knife-edge " indeed, where the god of the 
winds seemed to have his chief warehouse. For once the view was en- 
tirely free from mist. To the east, the V-shaped valley up which we 
had come lay far below, twisting away to the left, to be lost at last be- 
tween hazy mountain chains. There were many more farmers here 
than in the rich and level Cauca valley, either because the government 
is too far distant to drive them out by its exactions, or because the In- 
dian is in his element among these lofty ranges. On every hand the 
steep mountain sides were flecked with little farms of all possible 
shapes, colored by green or ripening grain or corn, a tiny hut in the 
center of each patch, minute with distance, but as clearly visible as if 
only a few yards away. To the west lay a pandemonium of mighty 
valleys, pitched and tumbled peaks, gigantic saw-toothed ranges, seen 
and suggested into the uttermost distance. 

But one could not stand long in so icy a wind to admire even such a 

96 



f ° & 



G. TO 



3. p 




DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

scene. A few yards below, the road forked, one branch stumbling 
headlong down into that chaotic jumble of wooded hills and valleys, 
the other striking off through the forest along the flank of the range. 
A mistake at that height might mean hours or even days of extra toil. 
We chose at random and trusted to luck. The soft, almost level road 
plunged away through a dense green forest, as truly " bearded with 
moss " as any in our North, yet rich with parasites and ferns. Great 
oaks littered the ground with acorns. I drew ahead and marched on 
through utter solitude, the stillness broken only by the cold wind from 
the south, immense vistas of dense-wooded Andes now and then open- 
ing out through a break in the tree-tops. Where the forest began to 
give way, my misgivings were set at rest by a group of dull-eyed Indians 
of both sexes, their mouths stained with coca-leaves, plodding upward 
in single file, still maudlin with the fire-water that marked the vicinity 
of a town. All wore heavy, cream-colored felt hats, and bore varying 
burdens, the women carrying the heavier loads and in addition a 
baby slung across their breasts by a cloth knotted behind the neck. 

Not far beyond, I burst out suddenly upon a full view of Almaguer, 
almost directly below, perched astride a narrow ridge between two 
mountains, serene in its precarious seat despite the raging wind that 
seemed constantly threatening to blow it off into oblivion. Then, as 
suddenly, it disappeared, and I was almost within the town before I 
caught sight of it again. 

Here we caught one Barbara Diaz red-handed in the act of feeding 
her swarming family, and refused to be driven away. Lodging, how- 
ever, seemed unattainable. A woman seated on her earth floor before 
an American sewing-machine run by hand carelessly admitted that she 
had a room to rent before she thought to say " further on." But on 
second thoughts she decided that it would be-" muy trabajoso " to pre- 
pare it for us — in other words, very tiresome to get up from the floor 
and produce a key. The alcalde was out of town ; the one woman who 
owned a vacant little shop asserted with an air of finality that her 
husband was not at home. I turned to the court of last appeal, the 
village priest. He was a long-unshaven but pleasant fellow of forty, 
educated in the seminary of Popayan, occupying, with a discreet but 
attractive young " housekeeper," the second-best building in town — 
the best being the mud church adjoining. His well-stocked library, in 
Latin and Spanish, with a few volumes in French and English, was a 
feast for the eyes in these bookless wilds. During our long chat the 
good padre asserted that all the Indians for a hundred miles around 

97 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

were good and faithful Catholics, and that almost all of them could 
read and write ! He had long planned to learn English, but had " such 
a fearful lot of work to do, so many masses to say every day and con- 
fessions without rest." He took down a book and requested me to 
read some English aloud, " just to hear how it sounds." Casu- 
ally, somewhere during the interview, I brought in a brief refer- 
ence to lodging, and the padre forthwith sent across the plaza a small 
boy who soon returned and led us to the same woman who had last 
turned us away. Now that the padre ordered, she had no hesitancy in 
overlooking the absence of her husband. The lodging cost us nothing, 
which was exactly what it was worth. It was the usual mud cavern, 
with a floor of trodden earth, cold as a dungeon in contrast to the 
blazing sunshine outside, and, having once been a shop, was all but 
filled with a dust-carpeted counter and yawning shelves curtained and 
draped with cobwebs. Hays drew the counter, but I found room to 
stow myself away on one of the higher shelves, though with neither 
mattress nor covering and a wind as off the antarctic ice sweeping at 
express speed across the thin cuchillo between two bottomless Andean 
gullies, we did not look forward to darkness with pleasure. 

The only water supply of Almaguer, attached to the world only by 
the " royal highway " at either end, was a little wooden spout project- 
ing from the hillside. The estanquillo had no lack of aguardiente, how- 
ever, and as to washing, Almaguer avoids what would otherwise be a 
difficulty by never having formed the habit. The making of candles is 
its chief industry. A bluish wax is gathered from a " laurel " tree 
which abounds in the region, and even the acting alcalde spent the even- 
ing making candles by dipping pieces of string again and again into a 
bowl of molten wax. That worthy was also village schoolmaster and 
purveyor of patent medicines to Almaguer ; a lank, ungainly man in an 
habitual lack of shave, with a handkerchief knotted about his neck like 
a Liverpool wharf-rat. Before the sun had set he ahd given us a score 
of commissions, chiefly in the patent medicine line, to be fulfilled when 
we returned to the " Europe." Then he fell to talking of a " Meestare 
Eddy Sone " and his inventions. For some time we fancied the per- 
sonage in question was some local celebrity, and not until the patent- 
medicine-schoolmaster-alcalde had turned the conversation to a 
" Meestare Frunk Lean," who was also, it seemed, a great gringo 
electrician, and answered to the surname of Benjamin, did we catch 
the drift of his monologue. He had brought up the subject, it turned 
out, because he had long been curious to know whether the Meestares 

98 



DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

Frank Lean and Eddy Sone often met to plan their work together, or 
whether, as so often happened among the great men of Almaguer,. they 
were unfortunately rivals and enemies. 

It is always a long time night in this Andean land of no lights and 
little covering. The read-less evenings seem interminable. Small 
wonder the inhabitants are ignorant and priest-ridden when they can 
only sit and gossip after the sun goes down. The traveler eats supper 

— if it is to be had — takes a walk, talks awhile with some one — if 
he is gifted with the medieval art of conversation — comes " home," 
sits around awhile on the earth floor or an adobe block, thinks over his 
past history and future plans — if any — wishes he smoked, and, finally 
deciding to go to bed, looks at his tin watch to find it is almost seven! 
In Almaguer there were none of these drawbacks. For, as I lay abed, 

— on my upper shelf — the " laurel " candle gave sufficient flicker by. 
which to make out the dimly printed pages of a Bogota masterpiece 

— so long as I kept wide enough awake to balance the candlestick on 
my forehead. 

It is not far from Almaguer to its twin city of Bolivar; yet they 
are far apart. On the map one could stroll over in an hour or two, 
pausing for a nap on the way. So could one in real life but for a single 
drawback, — the lack of a bridge. Both towns, the largest between 
Popayan and Pasto, lie at about the same 7500 feet above the level of 
the sea; but between them is a gash in the earth which does not reach 
to the infernal regions simply and only because these are not situated 
where ancient — and some modern — theologians fancied them. 

For days now there had been persistent rumors of salteadores, high- 
way robbers, reputed experts in the art of shooting travelers in the back 
from any of the countless hiding-places along the trail. Every town, 
in turn, asserted that its own region was eminently safe; the danger 
was always in the next one. Each traveler we met — and they were 
never alone — carried a rifle or a musket. Once, at an awkward defile, 
we suddenly caught sight of an ugly-looking group of ruffians on a 
knoll above, and our back muscles twitched reflexively until we had 
climbed out of range. The fact that our own weapons hung in plain 
sight may have been the cause of their inaction. Again, in San 
Lorenzo, of especially evil repute, several shifty-eyed fellows showed 
great interest in our movements. When we took the opportunity to 
oil our side-arms and demonstrate their quick action, however, the 
group assured us that the robbers never troubled foreigners, and 
faded gradually away. 

99 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

The danger, if it existed, was multiplied by the fact, that we 
were forced to canvass the town until we had changed our money into 
silver. We were about to enter the half-autonomous Department of 
Narino, southernmost of Colombia, where the paper bills of the central 
government have never been accepted. Yet the department has no 
money of its own. Silver coins of whatever origin have a fixed worth, 
according to size rather than face value, those with holes in them losing 
nothing thereby. Pieces of the weight of our silver dollar were known 
as fuertes, and valued at 36 cents. Our quarter, or an English shilling, 
was accepted as " dos reales," — seven cents. Among the hodgepodge 
of coins that came into my possession was a two-peseta piece of old 
Spain, dated 1794 under the profile of Charles IV. The shopkeeper 
with whom I spent it valued it at two reales because it was somewhat 
smaller than the four-real piece, but after an argument accepted it as 
four. The twenty dollars we each gathered made a sackful nearly as 
heavy as all the rest of our baggage. 

The landscape, too, had changed. Instead of the hot, dry, re- 
pulsive ranges behind, we were again in deep-green woods and fields, 
the trail climbing from bamboo-clad valleys where ran cold mountain 
streams so clear we could not see the water, but only the bottom of the 
bed, to wind-swept oaken heights. In places there were slight outcrop- 
pings of coal. Then a lung-bursting road rick-racked for hours up a 
wall-like mountainside, now and then, when we were ready to drop 
from exhaustion, bringing us out on a little level space, like a landing on 
an endless stairway, then scrambling on up still steeper heights. When 
at last we stood on the blade-edge of the Cuchillo de Bateros, dividing 
autonomous Narino from the rest of Colombia, Bolivar, two days be- 
hind, lay as plainly in sight as a house across the street, the immense 
peak beside it sunk to an insignificant knoll. To the west we could 
look down into the misty valley of the Patia — and wonder whether we 
would not have done better to have taken its more level route, for all 
its fevers. 

At dusk we came out on a headland and saw, so directly below 
that a false step would have pitched us, or rather our mangled 
remains, down into its very plaza, the mathematically regular town of 
San Pablo, in the floor-flat river bottom of the Rio Mayo, with rich 
meadows stretching east and west to the rocky mountain walls that 
boxed them in. The descent was so steep that we could only hold our 
own by wedging our toes into the shale and keeping our thigh-muscles 
taut as brake-rods; so swift that the trail often split to bits from its 

100 




Crossing the Cauca River with a pack-train by one of the typical "ferries" of the Andes 




A village of the mountainous region south of Popayan 



DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

own momentum. In the town we were startled to have the first boy 
we met admit that posada could be had. His own mother had a room 
to rent. He laid aside the hat he was weaving and, picking up a 
bunch of enormous keys, stepped toward an adobe building across 
the street. But at that moment a patched and barefoot man rushed 
down upon us, likewise offering us posada in a startling burst of elo- 
quence. For a time it looked as if, for once, instead of having to 
fight for lodgings, lodgings were going to fight for us. We settled 
the dispute by the simple expedient of asking each his price. 

" One real," answered the boy, defiantly. 

" In my oiicina de peluqueria/' said the man, haughtily, " it will 
cost you nothing. Moreover, foreigners always lodge there." 

Behind his bravado he seemed so nearly on the point of weeping 
that we should no doubt have chosen his " office of barbering," even 
had there been no such gulf between the rival prices. He thanked us 
for the favor and, producing from somewhere about his person an 
enormous key, unlocked one of those unruly shop-doors indigenous 
to rural South America, above which projected a shingle bearing on 
one side the information that we were about to enter the " Peluqueria 
Civica," and on the other the name of our host, Santiago Mufioz. 
The keyhole was of the shape of a swan; others in the town, as 
throughout Narino, had the form of a man, a horse, a goose, and a 
dozen more as curious. These home-made doors of Andean villages, 
be it said in passing, never fit easily ; their huge clumsy locks have 
always some idiosyncrasy of their own, so that by the time the 
traveler learns to unlock the door of his lodging without native as- 
sistance, he is ready to move on. 

This one gave admittance to the usual white-washed mud den, with 
a tile floor, furnished as a Colombian barber-shop, which means that 
it was chiefly empty and by no means immaculate, with two wooden 
benches, three tin basins and an empty water-pitcher, a home-made 
— or San Pablo-made — chair, a lame table littered with newspapers 
from a year to three months old, a scanty supply of open razors, 
strops, Florida water, soap, and brushes scattered promiscuously, a 
couple of once-white gowns of " Mother Hubbard " form for cus- 
tomers, and in one corner a heap of human hair, black and coarse. 
Then there were the luxuries of a clumsy candlestick with six inches 
of candle, and a lace curtain worked with red and blue flowers to cut 
off the gaze of the curious, except those bold enough frankly to push 
it aside and stare in upon us. Santiago gave us full possession, key 

IOI 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

and all — we tossed a coin to decide which of us should burden him- 
self with the latter — and informed us that a woman next door to the 
church sometimes supplied meals to travelers. 

The benches were barely a foot wide, but they were of soft wood, 
and we were so delighted to find accommodations plentiful that I 
was about to make a similar suggestion when Hays yawned: 

" Let 's hang over here to-morrow." 

Late next morning the barber wandered in upon us. 

" Last year," he began, " another meestare " — in the Andes the word 
is used as a common noun to designate not only Americans, but Euro- 
peans and even Spaniards — " stopped here. You perhaps know him. 
His name was Guiseppe." 

We doubted it. 

" Surely you must know him," persisted the barber, " he was a 
foreigner, also." 

As he talked, Santiago kept fingering a crumpled letter. Bit by 
bit he half betrayed, half admitted, that he gave free lodging to estran- 
jeros because he wished to keep on good terms with the " outside " 
world in general, and in particular because he was seeking some means 
of sending six dollars to that strange town beyond the national 
boundaries from which all foreigners came. When he had explained 
himself at length, he turned the letter over to us. It was in correct 
Spanish, mimeographed to resemble a typewritten personal communica- 
tion, and told in several pages of flowery language what I can per- 
haps condense within reasonable limits : 

CHIROLOGICAL COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA 

Inspiration Point, 
Echo Park, 
Los Angeles, 
Cal. U. S. A. 
Muy sefior mio: 

With great pleasure we send you a pamphlet on " Secret Force," because we 
know that it contains information which will be of vast importance to you, 
as a means of being able to obtain that secret knowledge of the human char- 
acter and of personal influence permitting you in a moment to know and 
understand the life of all other persons, to know their desires and their intentions, 
their habits and deficiencies, their plans and all that can be prejudicial to you. 
Following our system, you can read the character of your neighbors as an open 
book ; if you possess the system " Natajara," there will be no one who can deceive 
you ; by means of it you can know beforehand under all circumstances all that 
others intend to do, and can direct them to your own entire satisfaction. By 

I02 



DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

means of the system " Natajara " you can know exactly how much progress, how 
much love, how much health, and how much happiness the future has in store for 
you ; and if it does not reserve for you as much as you desire, you can change its 
course to suit your ambitions. 

Never, in the present century or those past, has a more potent knowledge 
been given to the world. It teaches precisely when and how to use the 
magic force by means of which one obtains the realization of all desires; it 
places those who possess it in a sphere superior to the generality of mankind, 
makes them masters of destiny. ... I dare not tell you all the advantages of 
this knowledge, but I assure you it is what you need that your life convert 
itself into a true success. I beg you to read the " Secret Force," letter by letter, 
and to send at once for the system "Natajara." Remember that the sending to 
you of the system for a mere $6-ts""only a special offer that we make, and if you 
wish to have the privilege of being the first in your locality to possess these great 
secrets, you ought to send this very day. 

Without further particulars, etc., I take great pleasure in signing myself 
Your grateful and affectionate servant, 

(Signed) A. Victor Segno, 

President per Sec. 

Dictated to No. 1 S. 

There was no doubt that Santiago had followed the injunction to 
read the pamphlet letter by letter. Thanks to his Colombian school- 
ing, that was the only way he could read it. But how was he to send 
the mere $6 to Inspiration Point without his fellow-townsmen know- 
ing it and perhaps forestalling his opportunity to be the first in his 
locality to possess the powerful secret? There is no postal-order sys- 
tem between Colombia and the United States. He dared not send the 
cash, even if so large an amount of Narifio silver could be enclosed 
in a parcel the post would carry. So he had hidden the letter away 
and lain in wait for the rare foreigners that drift into San Pablo. 
While we read it, he sat on one of our " beds " nervously fingering 
his toes. When we had finished, he begged us to find some way of 
sending the money, imploring us, on our hopes of eternity, not to 
whisper a word of the secret to his fellow-townsmen. We promised to 
think the matter over. 

" When are you going to open the shop this morning ? " asked Hays, 
as our host turned toward the door. 

" Oh, I shall not trouble to open to-day," said the barber, in a weary 
voice, and wandered away with the air of a man who sees no need 
of common toil when he is on the point of becoming the dictator of 
fate in all his locality. 

We hatched a scheme against his return. If we fancied he might 

103 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

forget the matter, we were deceived. Nothing else ' seemed to be 
weighing on his mind when he turned up again in the evening, dejected 
and worried. To have tried to explain the truth to him would have 
been only to convince him that we were agents of some rival house, 
sent down here purposely to ruin his chances of imposing his will 
upon San Pablo. 

" If you feel you must have this system," I began, " I '11 tell you 
what I '11 do. I have some money in a bank in the Estados Unidos, 
and I will give you a personal check for $6 that you can mail to the 
Chirological College." 

" Magnifico ! " cried the barber, instantly transformed from the 
depths of gloom to the summits of glee, " A thousand thanks. That 
will be $6oo in billetes of Colombia. I will get it at once. . . ." 

" It will be simpler," I suggested, " to wait until you hear the check 
has arrived; then send it to me. Naturally I am running no risk 
in trusting one of the chief men of San Pablo. Anyway, it would only 
be in payment for our magnificent lodgings." 

The Colombian rarely needs much urging to accept a favor, and his 
formal protests soon died away. I sat down to write the check : 

The Fake Bank, 

920 West 110th Street, 

New York, U. S. A. 

Pay to the order of the 

Chirological College of 

Los Angeles, Cal., 

the sum of six dollars ($6). 

Baron Munchausen. 

The barber carefully folded the valuable document and hid it away 
in his garments, promising to send it at the first opportunity — in a 
plain envelope, unregistered : " For," he explained, confiding to us a 
nation-wide secret, " the post-office officials always steal any letter they 
think has money in it, and to register it makes them sure it has." 

The plan was cruel, but we could think of no other. No doubt 
Santiago waited many anxious months for the arrival of the " sys- 
tem " ; certainly no longer than he would have if he had managed to 
send real money. Meanwhile, as Latin-American enthusiasm shrinks 
rapidly, it may be that he grew resigned to his failure to become the dic- 
tator of San Pablo and took up again the shaving of its swarthy faces 
and the cutting of its coarse, black hair. 

Every house of San Pablo is a factory of " panama " hats. The 

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DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

" straw " is furnished by the toquilla plant, a reed somewhat resem- 
bling the sugarcane in appearance, which grows in large quantities in 
the valley of the Patia. If left to itself, the plant at length blossoms 
or " leaves " out in the form of a fan-shaped fern. Once it has 
reached this stage, it is no longer useful to the weaver of hats. For 
his purposes the leaves must be nipped in the bud, so to speak, — gath- 
ered while still in the stalk. The green layers that would, but for this 
premature end, have expanded later into leaves, are spread out and 
cut into narrow strips with a comb-shaped knife. The finer the cut- 
ting, the more expensive the hat. Between the material of a $2 and a 
$50 " panama " there is no difference whatever, except in the width of 
the strips. Boiled and laid out in the sun and wind, these curl tightly 
together. They are then bleached white in a sulphur oven and sold to 
the weaver in the form of tufts not unlike .the broom straw, or a 
bunch of prairie-grass. The Patia produces also a much heavier leaf, 
called mocora, from which not only coarse hats but hammocks are 
twisted. 

The weaving of the " panama " begins at the crown, and the edge 
of the brim is still unfinished, with protruding " straws," when turned 
over to the wholesale dealer. Packed one inside the other in bales a 
yard long, they are carried on muleback to Pasto. There, more 
skillful workmen bind in and trim the edges. They are then placed 
in large mud ovens of beehive shape in which quantities of sulphur 
are burned. Next they are laid out in the back yard of the establish- 
ment — with chickens, dogs, and other fauna common to the dwell- 
ings of the Andes wandering over them, be it said in passing — to 
bleach in the sun; they are rubbed with starch to give them a false 
whiteness, and finally men and boys pound and pound them on blocks 
with heavy wooden mallets, as if bent on their utter destruction, tossing 
them aside at last, folded and beaten flat, in the form in which they 
appear eventually in the show-windows of our own land. The best 
can be woven only morning or evening, or when the moon is full and 
bright, the humidity of the air being then just sufficient to give the 
fiber the required flexibility. 

The local names for the entire process are : 

" Tejar " — the task of the weaver. 

" Asocar" — the drawing together and trimming of the protruding 
" straws." 

" Azufrar" — the baking over burning sulphur. 

" Banar en leche de azufre " — washing in a sulphur bath. 

105 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

" Limpiar con trapo " — scrubbing with rags dipped in starch. 

" Mazatear " — beating with mallets. 

" Darle forma" — pressing the hat tightly over a wooden form to 
give it the final shape, after which it is folded and ready for shipment. 
The complete process from buying to shipping costs the wholesale 
dealer about a dollar a dozen. 

Virtually every inhabitant of San Pablo is, from childhood, an ex- 
pert weaver of hats. We had only to glance in at a door to be almost 
sure to find the entire family, large and small, so engaged. They 
squatted on their earth floors, leaned in their doorways, wandered the 
streets, incessantly weaving hats; they gossiped and quarreled, they 
grew vociferous in political discussion, and still they went on weaving. 
They shouted across the plaza to the two " meestares " that were the 
guests of Santiago, the barber, a " Where-do-you-come-from-where- 
are-you-going-what-is-your-native-land ? " in one single flow of words, 
without a pause for breath, but their fingers continued to weave hats 
as steadily as if they were automatic contrivances. We were told that 
in all the history of the town only one boy had been too stupid to learn 
to weave. He was now the priest of a neighboring hamlet. Some 
make a regular business of it and weave several hats a week, as many 
as one " comiin " a day. Only the rare victim of an artistic tempera- 
ment prides himself on putting his best efforts, and from two weeks to 
a month of work, into an article of fine weave, to receive a small for- 
tune of eight or ten dollars in one windfall. It is in keeping with 
Latin-American character that only a very few choose this extended 
effort, instead of the short, ready-money task of weaving " comunes." 
The government telegraph operator of San Pablo — who probably aver- 
ages a dozen messages a week — had a record of one hat a day, six 
hats a week, the year round. That was probably at least double the 
average output, for very few worked with any such marked in- 
dustry. The overwhelming majority are amateur weavers, making 
one hat a week merely as an avocation in the interstices of their 
more regular occupations of cooking, planting, shopkeeping, school- 
teaching, and loafing. The boy in need of spending money, the village 
sport who plans a celebration, the Indian whose iron-lined stomach 
craves a draught of the fiery cana, the pious old woman fearful of 
losing the goodwill of her cura, all fall to and weave a hat in time for 
the Saturday market. Had they not these desires, unimportant though 
they may be, those in far-off lands who wear such head-dress would 
pay more dearly for a scarcer article. The more thrifty and am- 

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DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

bitious begin to braid next week's hat on the way home from market. 
By Sunday noon the hut is rare in all the land around in which at 
least one " panama " has not begun to come into being ; by Monday 
even the liquor-soaked have begun to see the necessity of getting busy, 
on penalty of suffering a dry week-end. The result is that the traveler 
can almost tell the day of the week by the stage of development of the 
hats he meets along the route. 

The center of the Narifio hat industry is Pasto. Not that its in- 
habitants are weavers, but here orders are received from the outside 
world and distributed among the towns of the province. Thus Jesus Diaz, 
local agent of San Pablo, receives one morning a telegram worded : 

" Suspend 12-15 5 start n-13." 

The figures refer to centimeters of brim and crown, the only varia- 
tion of style being in the comparative width of these. " Castores " are 
made for the American trade; " parejos " — "equals," of which brim 
and crown are of the same width, — go to Spain ; the " ratonera," of 
very narrow brim, finds its market in Habana. The weavers of San 
Pablo can seldom be induced to make the wide-brimmed hats for 
women, since these can be sold only in the United States and the market 
is very uncertain, " because there," a woman confided to us, " the 
style is always changing, as if they do not know their own minds." 
Unless they can be sold in our own land, these broad-brimmed hats are 
worthless, for the women of Narifio wear only what we would con- 
sider " men's styles." Those worn in San Pablo are of a square- 
topped, ugly form, roughly woven, as if each consigned to his own 
head those so carelessly made that they cannot be sold. 

His telegram received, Jesus sends his subagents out through the 
hamlets with the new specifications, here and there to prepay some- 
thing on the new order. For so from hand to mouth do many of the 
weavers live that they are frequently unable to buy the materials for 
the next hat without the agent's " advance." The " straw " for one 
hat costs from one to forty cents, depending on the fineness. The 
high price of the better grades is chiefly due to the long labor in- 
volved in the weaving, with, of course, the usual heavy middleman 
profits between maker and ultimate consumer. The daily hat of the 
telegraph operator brought him from ninety cents to a dollar; the 
final purchaser in the United States would pay $4 or $5 for it. The 
name " panama " is unknown in Narifio in connection with hats. 
None were ever made on the Isthmus ; they took the name by which we 
know them because Panama was long the chief distributing center. To 

107 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

their makers they are known simply as " hats," or, if it is necessary to 
specify, as sombreros de paja (straw hats), or sombreros de pieza. 
The best hats in all Colombia were said to be made in La Union, a little 
town lying in plain sight on a sloping hillside to the east ; but in spite 
of their patriotism, many admitted that the best on earth are those of 
jipijapa, made in Manabi, Ecuador. An old woman of La Union had 
won many prizes and awards in national and even international expo- 
sitions, not merely for her hats, which sold for a hundred fuertes here, 
and for $100 in Europe or the United States, but for aprons and other 
garments woven of the same " straw." The people of San Pablo com- 
plained that the Japanese, especially of the Island of Formosa, were 
capturing much of the world's trade with a clever imitation of 
Colombian hats, very fine and light, but of an inferior " straw " that 
has little durability. 

Dawn, the next morning, found us clattering away down the cobble- 
stones of San Pablo, the gigantic key protruding from its swan- 
shaped hole until Santiago, the barber, saw fit to awake from his 
dreams of future glory. At the top of a range beyond we met the 
first pastusos, solemn-faced horsemen in winter garments and heavy 
ruanas of army blue. On the further slope and the rich uplands be- 
yond there were many Indian hamlets, each thatched house in a little 
field of its own. The golden-brown grain of our homeland, the al- 
most forgotten wheat, began to appear in patches on the hillsides, with 
little fenced threshing-floors of trodden earth, round and round which 
the peasants chased their unharnessed horses. Every family had its 
patch of wheat, corn, or potatoes, according to the altitude. Among 
the latter were many species unfamiliar to us of the north, some with 
red, pink, or purple blossoms, whole acres of one color; for we were 
nearing the original home of the potato. In his own slow way the An- 
dean Indian still cultivates as in the days of the Incas many varieties 
unknown to the world at large, among others one shaped like the 
" double- jointed " peanuts of baseball fame, almost liquid inside. 

Higher still grew quinoa, somewhat like our burdock in appearance, 
the top full of seeds not unlike the lentil, — a palatable grain which 
for some strange reason has never been carried to other parts of the 
world. Under progressive farmers and modern methods, the region 
of Pasto could be the richest agricultural section of Colombia. But 
the Indian clings tenaciously to the ways of his ancestors, though in 
this autonomous department he is a free or community owner and lives 
far more comfortably than do the estate laborers to the north. An 

108 





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DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

American farmer would gasp at the laborious methods in vogue in a 
Colombian wheat-field. At harvest time, the phases of the moon 
being propitious, the saints and ancestral gods placated, men, women, 
and children wander out to the fields to cut the grain stalk by stalk, 
tie it into bundles as leisurely as if life were ten thousand years long, 
and, with a sheaf or two on their backs, toil away over the hills to 
their huts. There it is threshed by hand, or under the hoofs of 
animals; the chaff is separated by tossing the grain into the air with 
wicker-woven shovels, after which the wheat is spread out on a mat in 
the sun for days, turned over frequently and carried into the house by 
night. Once dry, it is ground by hand under a stone roller, beaten 
into flour, and baked over a fagot fire. in crude adobe ovens of bee- 
hive shape. Small wonder the two soggy little loaves of bread a 
woman raked out of one of these, and which I went on tossing from 
hand to hand, cost twice what a real loaf would in the United States. 

A valley with a decided tip to the south drew us swiftly on, as only 
easy going can, after steep and toilsome trails, and the afternoon was 
still young when we halted at San Jose, twenty-two miles from the 
barber's door. Here it "made much cold," and we were warned that 
it would make even more so in Pasto. But native information on this 
point is seldom of much value to the traveler. In the Andes, climate 
varies not by season but by location or altitude, and very few of the 
country people have any notion why one town differs in temperature 
from another. Accustomed all their lives to the fixed climate of 
their birthplace, they consider " bitter cold," or " de un calor atroz " 
(of atrocious heat), a neighboring hamlet where the mercury really 
falls but a few degrees lower or rises a bit higher. They accept the 
variation with the same passive indifference that governs their lives 
from mother's back to the grave, their Catholic training stifling the 
query " why." The fact remains ; the reason — " sabe Dios porque." 

It was September thirteenth, the first anniversary of the beginning 
of my Latin-American journey, when we swung on our packs again. 
In spite of our resolutions, the proximity of a city had the usual effect 
of increasing our ordinarily leisurely gait. Sunrise overtook us strid- 
ing down the great San Bernardo valley, a vast, well-inhabited gorge,, 
cultivated far up the mountain sides. Sugarcane mottled the land- 
scape here and there with its Nile-green. Every hut had its trapiche, 
a crude crusher with wooden rollers operated by oxen, or a still cruder 
one run by hand. Bananas were plentiful ; oranges lay rotting in thou- 
sands along the way. As the sun rose higher the pastuso arrieros and 

109 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

horsemen threw the sides of their ruanas back over their shoulders, 
disclosing the bright red linings. Once it had crossed the river at the 
bottom of the valley, the road — and it was a real road now, speaking 
well of the industry of Narino province — swung round and round 
the toothlike flanks of the mountain wall, rising ever higher for many 
miles, yet so gradually that we were scarcely conscious of climbing. 
Here at last we found ourselves in the Andes as the imagination had 
pictured them, — dry, mammoth, treeless, repulsive, wholly infertile 
mountains piled irregularly into the blue heavens on every hand. 
Under our feet the road suddenly began a buck and wing shuffle, and 
leaving it to its vagaries we scrambled and slid — particularly Hays 
in his smooth-bottomed moccasins — down toward the Juanambu 
river, to the pass where General Narino fought one of the great 
battles of the war of independence. Two hours beyond, we came out 
on the nose of a cliff with a sheer fall of thousands of feet — which 
we took care not to take — affording a view of the country we had 
crossed for days past, the trail of forty-eight hours before climbing 
away into the sky at what seemed but a rifle shot away. 

At Boesaco a woman agreed to prepare food if I would give her 
an " advance " sufficient to buy the necessary ingredients. When Hays 
arrived, we sat down to a dinner so plentiful that we rose again with 
difficulty. Life is like that in the Andes. The traveler must feed to 
bursting when the opportunity offers, and starve at times without 
complaint. We had already done a reasonable day's tramping, but the 
nearness of Pasto overcame our better judgment. A few miles out, 
a group of pastusos, of almost full Caucasian blood, rode by me with 
silent disdain. Evidently they disapproved of our mode of travel. 
Just beyond, the road broke up into many faint paths across a meadow, 
the stony old trail of colonial days toiling up the face of the mountain 
to the right. I drew an arrow in the sand lest Hays, lost in some 
reverie, should fail to note the shod feet by which we tracked each 
other so easily in a world where all who walk go barefoot. A mile or 
two across the meadow I fell in with an excellent new highway, well 
engineered, that took to scolloping in and out along the flank of an 
enormous range, with a steady rise that never for an instant ceased as 
long as the day lasted. Here and there a clear, cold stream trickled 
from the still unhealed mountainside piled into the sky above me. The 
visible world was wholly uninhabited now, with cold, bleak winds 
sweeping across the vast panorama of ranges below and above; while 
ahead, great patches of mist half-concealed the dense, bearded forests 

no 



DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

through which the road climbed doggedly. In these solitary Berruecos 
ranges General Sucre was but one of many who had been murdered by 
brigands or conspirators, and every turn of the lonely road offered 
splendid ambush. Indeed, it seemed strange that Colombia had proved 
so free from highway violence, with no other policing outside the capi- 
tal than, in the larger villages, an occasional mild-eyed youth in one 
piece of uniform, carrying a chain-twister or a home-made " night- 
stick." 

Toward nightfall a horseman overtook me. Six weeks on the road 
had left me in excellent condition, and in spite of the miles in my legs 
his animal could barely hold my pace. For a long time we mounted 
almost side by side, a new stretch of solitary highway staring us in the 
face at every turn, cold night settling down in utter solitude. It 
had grown wholly dark when we reached the summit, damp with the 
breath of the forest, an Arctic wind sweeping across it, with dense 
black night and a suggestion of vast mountain depths on all sides. 
The silent, gloomy pastuso was evidently suspicious of my intentions 
and refused to ride ahead. Nor was I too sure of him. The dislike 
of having an unknown traveler behind me had persisted since my 
tramp through Mexico, but there was no other choice than to take the 
lead. On the further side the road was poorer, with a sharp grade 
and hundreds of fine chances to sprain an ankle. Colombians do not 
travel by night when they can avoid it, and we met not a sign of life. 
The stony road descended so swiftly that I had difficulty in judging its 
pitch and a constant struggle to keep from falling on my face. Sud- 
denly, at a chaos of paths, rocks, and jagged holes, as of some earth- 
quake, I cross an unseen but noisy stream by a sagging log and, 
leaving the cautious horseman behind, saw him no more. 

On and on the rough and broken world dropped before me, with 
never a moment of respite for my aching thighs. I was concluding I 
had lost the way entirely, when suddenly there burst upon me all the 
electric lights of Pasto — actually electric lights, forty-two of them, 
as I could count from my point of vantage, each of what would have 
been sixteen candle-power had each had some fourteen candles to 
help out. I slipped on my coat in anticipation of entering a hotbed 
of civilization, for was not Pasto the largest city between Bogota 
and Quito? 

I have ever been over-hopeful. A city it was, to be sure, in the 
South American sense, but travelers, other than those of the mule- 
driver class, come rarely to Pasto, and those who do arrive decorously 

in 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

by day, and seek the homes of friends. I had been given the name of 
the " Hotel Central." The first passerby directed me to it, but added 
the information that they no longer " assisted," that is, gave meals. 

" But they have rooms ? " 

" No, they never did have rooms. They were only a hotel." 

Words have strange meanings in the far interior of South America. 

All that was left me was the posada, an ancient, dark, and gloomy 
one-story building around a patio, full of the scent and noises of 
mules and horses, and of arrieros wrapped in their blankets. Even 
the corner policeman advised me to keep the " room " offered me and 
be thankful. It was fortunate that Hays had not arrived, for both of 
us could scarcely have crowded into the damp, earthy-smelling dungeon, 
to say nothing of occupying the plank " bed." Evidently he had found 
lodging somewhere along the way. During the day I had laid forty- 
two miles behind me, yet so fresh had I arrived that I went out for a 
stroll before retiring to pass a night almost as cold as in Bogota, 
dressed in every rag I owned, with two adobe bricks as pillow, and 
as covering against the bitter cold that crept in even through the 
closed door — the privilege of hugging myself. 

I had taken my coffee and wandered the streets of Pasto for an 
hour next morning when I suddenly sighted Hays, accompanied by a 
ruana-clad native. Usually as immaculate as conditions permitted, 
he was now unwashed, unshaven, bedraggled, drawn of features and 
generally disreputable, with a sheepish look that turned to relief at 
sight of me. He had a sad story to tell. Lost in some dream, he 
had overlooked my arrow in the sand and taken the old stony road 
over the Berruecos range. It was a shorter route in miles, and had 
the doubtful advantage of leading him past the very spot at which 
Sucre was assassinated ; but the now abandoned trail of colonial days 
was in such a condition that he had several times come near break- 
ing a leg, if not his neck. Limping at last into town, late at night, he 
had wandered the streets for some time in vain, when two natives 
asked if he was looking for lodging. Congratulating himself on his 
good fortune, he fell into step with them. A square or two further 
on one of the pair disclosed a policeman's " night-stick " hanging from 
his arm. Hays excused himself and turned away, only to be halted 
with the information that the law of Pasto required that any stranger 
arriving after eight at night be taken to the police station. The ex- 
corporal of the Zone, accustomed for years to order his subordinates 
to lock up other men, was appalled at the notion of being himself 

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DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

locked up. His affronted dignity favored the pair with some of the 
most expressive Castilian to be found within the covers of Ramsey. 
All in vain. At the station the lieutenant, who rose from a troubled 
sleep with a towel around his head, was courtesy itself, explaining 
that Pasto would not dream of subjecting so distinguished a foreigner 
to arrest. But as the night was late and the streets cold, they were 
doing him the favor of lodging him, not in jail, but in the police 
barracks. Looked at in that light, and at that hour, the affair as- 
sumed a new aspect. Hays voiced his thanks and slipped from under 
his pack. A policeman led him to the squad room, gave him a reed 
mat to spread on the floor beside the score already asleep, and cov- 
ered him with one of the red and blue ruanas of Pasto. On such 
terms I would gladly have spent the night under arrest myself. At 
midnight there had rushed into the room all the policemen on duty in 
town. Each dragged his relief to his feet and at once dived into the 
vacated " bed," leaving Pasto for a half-hour at the mercy of the law- 
less. At dawn the order to muster was sounded. The policemen 
each and all turned over for another nap, and only rose when the 
querulous little chief of police came to give the order in person, even 
then after considerable argument. Hays had started to take his leave, 
but was called back to give his pedigree. The government paper was 
in my hands. The chief apologized for the necessity, but put him in 
charge of the ruana-clad detective until he could examine the docu- 
ment in question. 

We planned to spend several days in Pasto, but our efforts to get 
better lodgings did not meet with rosy success. We were once even 
on the point of renting a two-story house on a corner of the plaza — 
only to find that though it had room enough to accommodate a score 
of persons, it was furnished simply and exclusively with the wooden- 
floored bedsteads indigenous to the Andes. Meanwhile, the bridal 
chamber of the posada was vacated and we fell heirs to it — at nine 
cents a day each. 

The capital of Colombia's southernmost department, claiming a 
population of 16,000, sits in the capacious lap of the extinct Pasto 
volcano, seeming, in spite of its 14,000 feet elevation, a mere hill, for 
the city itself is more lofty than Bogota. By no means so backward' 
and fanatical a mountain town as described by its rivals to the north, 
it proved the most lively and progressive place we chanced upon be- 
tween the Cauca and Ecuador. A highway links it with the outside 
world by way of Tuquerres and Barbacoas, thence by boat to the island 

113 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

port of Tumaco on the Pacific. Yet there remains much provincialism 
and a stout clinging to the ways and the medieval faith of colonial 
days. With few exceptions the entire population kneels in the street 
when any high churchman moves abroad. In one of the many over- 
grown churches is a glorified letter-box with a sign exhorting the 
" faithful " to write to San Jose, reputed to have his dwelling-place 
near the town, requests for those favors they wish granted, and en- 
closing something for Jose's coin-box. Once a week the letters are 
removed by a monk and, the worldly offering having been extracted, 
are burned before the statue of the saint. Wheeled traffic, of course, 
is unknown in Pasto ; virtually everything of importance comes up 
from the sea on muleback. The most ambitious native handicraft we 
found was the making of tiples, crude guitars of red cedar and white 
pine. 

At first sight Pasto has the aspect of a mighty mart of trade. Every 
street is lined from suburb to suburb by the wide-open doorways 
of shallow shops crammed with wares incessantly duplicated. To all 
appearances, there are more sellers than buyers. Pride in hidalgo 
blood, however diluted, is evidently so widespread that no one works 
who can in any way avoid it, all preferring to sit behind a counter in 
the hope of selling ten cents' worth of something a day to earning as 
many dollars in some productive labor at the risk of soiling their 
fingers. Most numerous are the food-shops, run chiefly by women, 
who find ample time between clients to do their housekeeping in a 
Colombian way. An inventory of one display, sloping from sidewalk 
to ceiling, is a description of all. Large, irregular bricks of salt, pink- 
ish in color, and rectangular blocks of the muddy-brown first-product 
of the sugar-cane, form the basis of every heap. Next in order are 
cones of half-refined sugar, a variety of home-made sweets, long slabs 
of yellow soap from which is cut whatever amount the purchaser 
desires ; baskets of small potatoes, of shelled corn, and quinoa. Then 
there are oranges and bananas of several varieties, plantains, mangoes, 
strings of onions, heaps of one, two, and four-cent loaves of wheat 
bread, or pan de queso, — a mixture of flour and grated cheese — 
the largest of which barely attains the size of a respectable American 
biscuit. An abundance of canned goods, largely from the United 
States, invariably forms the top of the pyramid. These imported 
wares seem to have little sale among the natives, being kept in stock 
apparently in the fond hope of the arrival of stray gringos exuding 
wealth at every pore. To the townsmen, indeed, the prices are almost 

114 



DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

prohibitive. A can of " salmon," filled with pale and ancient carp and 
deteriorated coloring matter, cost 65 cents; a five-cent box of Ameri- 
can crackers was valued at 36 cents 1 " Tabacos," as the black stogie of 
local make and consumption is called, a few iron-heavy cups and 
saucers, odds and ends of gaudy dishes, and small edibles and trinkets, 
fill in the interstices of every display. 

Almost as numerous are the hawkers of strong drink, likewise 
women, who fall back upon their sewing between customers. Compe- 
tition is livelier in this line, and prices correspondingly lower. A bottle 
of Milwaukee beer sold at 40 cents. Countless cloth-shops, with 
bolts of cheap grade and of every color of the rainbow piled high in the 
doorways ; boticas, or dingy little drugstores of breath-taking prices ; 
and establishments offering everything that can by any stretch of the 
imagination be rated hardware, appear to be the chief male pastimes. 
Like so many towns of the Andes, Pasto does not seem to indulge in 
any form of intellectual recreation; unless the art of conversation, 
so diligently practiced, can be rated such. There is not a bookstore in 
town. In a few shops are piled, among other wares, stacks of religious 
volumes and Catholic propaganda, including school-books dealing 
chiefly with the lives of the saints ; but nothing more. It is a " change- 
less " town. There were once plenty of medios and, earlier still, 
cuartillos, we were informed ; but these small pieces had all been given 
in alms to the Church. The smallest coin still in circulation is the 
real — the word centavo disappears at the department boundary. He 
who buys a lump of sugar or a salt rock must take home a needle, an 
onion, or a banana in change. At the post-office, where the real is 
accepted at something less than in the public markets, the purchaser 
may take his change in stamps, though the pastuso custom seems to be 
to give it to the clerk as a " tip." 

High as it lies, Pasto is but two days muleback from the great 
montana, the hot lands and the beginning of the Amazon system. 
Just out beyond the cold mountain lakes of La Laguna comes a quick 
descent to Caqueta and the great jungles of eastern South America. 
Hence we saw in the streets of Pasto not merely the now familiar 
" civilized " Indian of the highlands, plodding behind his no more 
stolid bulls laden with the produce of his chacras, but also no small 
number of " wild men " from the wilderness. These have a free, 
happy, independent air, in marked contrast to the manner of the dismal 
mountain Indian ; none of the cautious, laborious, canny attitude toward 
life of those subject to the environment of high altitudes. They ap- 

115 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

pear to hold the domesticated Indian in great scorn, and mix far more 
freely with the other classes of the population. Dressed in what 
could easily be mistaken for the running pants of an athlete, their 
marvelously developed bronzed legs are bare in any weather. A light 
ruana covers their shoulders. A few wear a gray wool skullcap ; most 
of them only their matted, thick, black hair, cut short across the neck 
in " Dutch doll " fashion. There were always several women in each 
group, but one must look sharply to make sure of the sex, dressed 
identically like their male companions, bare legs, hair-cut, and all. 

We took leave of Pasto four days after our arrival. That night — 
Hays having his usual luck in winning the single wooden bench — I 
slept on a hairy cowhide on the earth floor of an Indian hut beside the 
Ancasmayu, or Blue River, about the northern limit of the Inca 
Empire at its height ; and all night long guinea-pigs kept running over 
me, squeaking their incessant treble grunt, gnawing at anything that 
seemed edible. Besides the llama, and, perhaps, the allco, a mute dog 
that is said to have been exterminated by the hungry Conquistadores, 
the only domestic animal of the Andes at the time of the Conquest were 
these lively little rodents so absurdly misnamed in English, since they 
are neither of the porcine family nor known in Guinea, being in- 
digenous to South America. The Spaniards more reasonably called 
them conejos de India — " rabbits of India." To the natives they were, 
and still are, known as cui (kwee), the origin of which term is evident 
to anyone who has listened to their grunting squeak through an endless 
Andean night. In pre-Conquest days — the llama being too valuable 
an animal to eat, even had the herds not been the personal property 
of the Inca — the cui probably constituted the only meat, except wild 
game, of the Indian's scanty diet. To-day every hut in the Andean 
highlands is overrun by them. The gente decente facetiously assert 
that the Indians keep them for two purposes, — to eat, and as a means 
of learning the art of multiplication. 

Next day the road was all but impassable, or we should have reached 
Ipiales on the frontier that evening. Not that it was a bad road, as 
roads go in the Andes, but rain had fallen most of the night, and we 
skated down each slope in constant expectation of a mud-bath, to claw 
our way almost on hands and knees to the succeeding summit. Once 
we tobogganed thousands of feet clear through a town in which we 
had planned to eat, literally unable to stop until we brought up against 
a luckily placed boulder on the edge of a stream in a roaring gorge far 
below. 

116 



DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

At lies, where Hays, hurrying on in quest of cigarettes which he 
detested only next to smokelessness, for once arrived before me, 1 
found dinner already preparing and my companion burdened with the 
key to a lodging. A tinsmith had left off work for the afternoon that 
we might have undisputed possession of his shop, stocked with a few 
ordinary articles of tinware, but given over chiefly to the fabrication 
of tin saints. Strange to say, once they had been sanctified by the 
priest, the results of his labors were as sacred to the tinsmith as to 
his fellow-townsmen. lies was just finishing a huge new church. The 
only implements of the workmen were shovels, for the whole building 
was of native mud, even to the roof-tiles. The entire Indian popula- 
tion, male and female, impressed into service by the padre, trotted in 
constant procession from the spot where the clay was mixed with 
mountain grass and trampled with bare feet, carrying on their heads 
tiles filled with the material, the women bearing also their babies slung 
on their backs. The free labor system of the Incas, inherited by the 
Conquistadores, is still in vogue in the isolated towns of the Andes, 
the taskmaster of to-day being the village cura. 

As we neared the frontier, population grew less and less frequent, 
and there were long stretches without an inhabitant. In the after- 
noon we turned aside from the " royal highway " to visit the " Vir- 
gen de las Lajas," the most famous shrine in Colombia. To it come 
pilgrims from all the Republic, from Ecuador and even further afield, 
to be cured of their ills. On the way down to it we fell in with an 
old man driving an ass, and heard the simple story of the founding of 
the sacred city. Centuries ago the Virgin had appeared here and 
given a small child a statue of herself — " descended straight from 
heaven, because it has a real flesh-and-blood face that bleeds if it is 
pricked, or if hair is pulled out." Then she had ordered the Bishop 
of Riobamba to build a chapel in the living rock of the mountain on 
the site of the apparition. Our informant was vociferous in his asser- 
tion that the Virgin daily cured victims of lameness, blindness, barren- 
ness, and a hundred other ailments ; but he ofifered no explanation of 
the fact that though he had lived in Las Lajas all his life, he was almost 
sightless from ophthalmia. 

The village, stacked up the sheer wall of a gorge in the far depths 
of which roared a small but powerful stream, had about it that some- 
thing peculiar to all " sacred " cities, — an intangible hint of unknown 
danger, perhaps from fanaticism, of ignorance, something of the sad- 
ness that comes upon the traveler at such evidences of the gullibility of 

117 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

mankind. Several " posadas de peligrinos," crude copies of the 
hospices of Jerusalem, and many little shops and stalls like those of 
Puree, town of the Juggernaut, furnish pilgrims with lodgings, food, 
blessed trinkets, and tons of English candles to burn before the mirac- 
ulous image. Ragged boys left off their top-spinning to beg " una 
limosnita — a little alms for the Virgin," as we descended through 
the town and went down by the sharpest zigzags to the white, four- 
story temple with its twin towers, hanging on the edge of the rocky 
gorge like encrusted foam of the waterfall that pitched into it. 
Though they make long journeys to implore her favor, the pilgrims 
have not reverence enough for their Virgin to reform their unspeak- 
able personal habits, and every story of the holy edifice was an of- 
fence to eyes and nose. The worker of miracles was the usual placid 
faced doll in rich vestments and gleaming jewels — or more likely 
paste imitations of those which the monks keep safely locked away in 
their vaults — behind a thick glass screen against which sad-eyed In- 
dians flattened their noses in supplication. 

The rolling hills of Ecuador lay close before us when we strode into 
Ipiales, the last town of Colombia and the coldest place we had known 
since our last northern winter. At this rate the equator would prove 
ice-bound. The place was said to have much commerce with the 
neighboring Republic, but the only signs we saw of it were a few troops 
of shivering donkeys. A mere five miles separates Ipiales from the 
frontier, and we had soon left behind the land of " Liberty and 
Order " and entered that of the equator. The road, crawling dizzily 
along the face of a death-dealing precipice, descends to a collection of 
huts called Rumichaca — Quichua for " rock bridge," which it is, in- 
deed, for the boundary river, Carchi, races under a huge natural arch 
across which the camino real passes without a tremor. To our sur- 
prise, there were no frontier formalities whatever. Ecuador was not 
even represented; the two Colombian customs officials, diffident, slow- 
witted, but kindly pastusos, asserted that no duties were collected on 
goods passing between the two countries, unless they were of foreign 
origin. Their task was merely to keep account of whatever passed 
the boundary ; for what purpose was not apparent, unless it was to pro- 
vide a sinecure for political henchmen. 

An hour later we were surprising the Ecuadorians lolling about 
the bare, sanded plaza of Tulcan. Only a lone telegraph wire had 
followed us over the frontier, yet the two countries blended into each 
other so completely that an uninformed traveler would not have 

118 



DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

guessed that he had crossed an international boundary. In the cuartel 
were housed a half-hundred soldiers, rather insolent fellows despite 
their Indian blood, their gaily colored ruanas giving Tulcan a needed 
touch of color, engaged in the rather passive occupation of protecting 
their little wedge-shaped country from the pressure of the larger one 
above. By the time I had lessened our burden of silver by changing 
it into bills of the country, Hays had fallen in with the jefe 
politico, the commander-in-chief of all the canton, who bade us make 
our home in his bachelor parlor as long as we chose to remain. The 
room was the most magnificent we had seen since Bogota, with long, 
solemn rows of upholstered chairs, straight-backed and dignified, 
framed family portraits that would not have gladdened an artist's 
heart, and two long but sadly narrow sofas covered with a horse-hair 
cloth that, after weeks on the planks and trodden-earth floors of Colom- 
bia, seemed elusive luxury personified. The jefe bade us keep our 
hats on, and left us with the Quito newspapers of a week back, our first 
touch with the outside world in some time. 

I suspected that Tulcan's chief dignitary had not treated us so regally 
out of mere kindness of heart ; and the suspicion was duly verified. 
We had stretched out on our elusive couches, and Hays was already 
asleep — or feigning it-most successfully, — when the jefe arrived from 
a merry evening with his aids and drew me into a conversation that 
promised to have no end. Under the guise of giving me information, 
he set himself to finding out, entirely by indirection, what might be 
our real motive in entering Ecuador by the back door, unannounced. 
Though he never for a moment suggested his suspicions openly, it was 
a late hour before he gave any evidence of being convinced that there 
was nothing sinister and perilous to the welfare of his country be- 
hind our simple story. Then he grew confidential and announced that, 
as men who had, and might again be, wandering in foreign parts, we 
were sure to run across two miscreants on whom he would like to 
lay his hands. One was Deciderio Vanquathem of Belgium, de- 
scribed as a ferrotype photographer and a sleight-of-hand performer 
of no mean ability. He had married a cousin of the jefe and bor- 
rowed a thousand sucres of our host to start a magic-lantern show,- 
only to disappear a week later leaving his wife, but not the thousand 
sucres, behind. The impression left by the jefe's complaint was that 
if he had reversed the process, there would have been no hard feel- 
ing. We were asked to keep an eye out also for one Francisco Fabra, 
boasting himself a Frenchman, who had written from " Ashcord " 

119 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

(Akron?), Ohio, proposing marriage to one of the jefe's sisters, but 
who had dropped out of sight upon receipt of her photograph. " No 
se debe burlarse asi de las mujeres — no man should play such jests 
on a woman," cried the jefe fiercely. 

Had we not fallen in next morning with two Indians likewise bound, 
I am not sure we should ever have reached San Gabriel. We were 
soon engaged in an utterly unpeopled series of paramos, lofty mountain- 
tops swept by icy winds, covered only with tufts of yellow bunch- 
grass and myriads of " frailejones," clumps of mullen-like leaves on a 
palm-like stem from six inches to two feet high, that peered at us 
through the mist like shivering, diffident mountain children. Our 
companions assured us that the plant was thus known because of its 
resemblance to a priest in his pulpit, and that the leaves were highly 
efficacious against headache. There was also the achupalla, a kind of 
wild pineapple with sword-like leaves that gave it the appearance of 
that form of cactus known as " Spanish bayonet," the heart of which, 
resembling a large onion or a small cabbage, is sold as food in the 
markets of the region. Then, for a long way, the trail led through a 
moss-grown forest reeking in mud, which we could only pass by jump- 
ing from bog to bog and clinging to trees along the way. 

San Gabriel sits conspicuously, and apparently unashamed, on the 
summit of an Andean knoll, its streets falling away into the valley on 
every side. In the outskirts we came upon a game new to both of us. 
In the irregular field that formed the plaza before a bulking mud church, 
a half-hundred barefoot Indian men and boys, each in a ruana of dis- 
tinctive gay color reaching to the knees, were pursuing a sphere about 
half the size of a football. Each player had bound on his right hand, 
like the cesta of the Spanish pelota player, a large, round instrument 
of rawhide, of the form of a flat snare-drum or a double-headed banjo. 
The rules of the game were evidently similar to handball or tennis. 
Hoping for some suggestion of aboriginal originality, I asked a player 
what the game was called. 

" Pelota (ball), sefior," he answered laconically. 

I might almost have guessed as much. 

"And that?" I persisted, pointing to the banjo-shaped instrument. 

" Guante (glove)," he replied. 

A really bright man might have guessed that, also. Evidently the 
tongue of the Incas had left little trace in San Gabriel. Suddenly the 
bell of the whitewashed church whanged. The players piled their 
" gloves " hastily in the form of a cross, and every living person in the 

1 20 



o 




DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

plaza, male or female, snatched off their hats and poured into the 
place of worship, from which arose some weird species of music as we 
pushed on into the town. 

A letter from the jefe of Tulcan gave us the entree to the parlor of 
one of his relatives. The fortnightly mail had just arrived, and Don 
Manuel was dictating letters to his daughter, who wrote slowly and 
painfully in a schoolgirl hand, dipping an ancient steel pen into a 
medieval inkwell between each word. When we returned at dark 
from a dingy little shop in which supper consisted chiefly of quimbolos, 
— a kind of corn pudding wrapped in cornhusks — we found Don 
Manuel, his wife, and four daughters all gathered in a family con- 
ference over the letter, each offering suggestions, not as to its subject 
matter, but on the dotting of the " i's " and the crossing of the 
" t's," a controversy which raged long and vociferously. Then there 
came marching into the room a huge mattress under which, on close 
inspection, we made out the feet of an Indian boy, and the family an- 
nounced that they were going to visit a pariente — a polite subterfuge 
to withdraw and leave us free to go to bed. The parlor was typical of 
the " best room " of well-to-do rural South Americans. A forest of 
chairs in shrouds and a chaos of gaudy bric-a-brac cluttered a chamber 
musty with little use. On the walls were framed portraits of the 
pudgy family ancestors back to the days of ruffles and powdered wigs, 
all draped with mourning crepe. The family library consisted of 
barely a half dozen books, all of the general style of Tomas a Kempis' 
" Imitacion de Cristo," except for a copy of an agricultural journal in 
Spanish, published in Buffalo. 

There are three routes from San Gabriel to Ibarra. To our surprise, 
we learned that all of them, far from following the high plateau, de- 
scended again into the hot country, for the valley of the Chota cuts a 
mighty slash entirely across Ecuador a bit north of the Imbabura vol- 
cano. The Indians told us the road was pedroso. It was the most 
exact information we ever had from men of their race. Anything 
more stony would be difficult to imagine. During all the afternoon 
there was not a moment in which we were not descending swiftly, our 
thigh muscles set with the tautness of brakerods, by an ever more 
stone-strewn road that curved in and out along the flanks of a barren 
range, forming loops as perfect as the written " m " of an expert in pen- 
manship ; on our left an enormous gash in the earth, dreary, desert- 
brown, with no other vegetation than the cactus — strangely enough 
called " mejico " in this region, — on our right, so close it all but grazed 

121 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

our elbows, the tawny, shale mountainside, seeming to rise and grow 
as we descended. Where the cold winds of the highlands turned tepid, 
Indians disappeared. For a long space there was no sign of man. 
With every turn of the road the heat grew more tropical. A green 
spot appeared almost directly beneath us, hazy as a crumpled green 
rag with an indistinct light shining behind it. Then two negroes 
passed, the first we had seen since leaving the Cauca. The road 
pitched headlong down a slope, donkeys and more negroes appeared, 
and the green patch developed into fields of sugarcane. Beyond them, 
by a wooden-roofed bridge, we crossed the Chota river and found 
ourselves at sunset in the " Caserio de la Chota." 

Tropical huts of reeds and thatch, quite unlike the thick-walled 
adobe dwellings of the highlands, even in form, lay scattered along 
the further bank. The entire population was jet black in color ; the 
life of the place as different from the plateau above as if we had 
suddenly been transported to another continent. Boisterous laughter 
broke often on the thickening dusk; above the chattering tongues 
resounded frequently the screams of an exploded jest or a sudden 
quarrel. A piccaninny bawled lustily, startling us into the realization 
that we had never yet heard an Indian baby cry. The insolence of 
these descendants of the slaves once imported in large numbers for 
the sugar plantations of Ecuador, who in the half century since the 
abolition of slavery had drifted into this tropical valley to bask in the 
sun, was in striking contrast to the obsequiousness of the Andean 
Indian. 

Beside the two rows of straw and reed shacks of the negroes stood 
a government building of stone and mud, one end of which was the 
telegraph office. In it the operator, who had left two days before to 
" visit some relatives for a few hours," had locked two kids that 
bleated incessantly. The open portion of the building was a shambles. 
Thirty-two miles from the top to the bottom of the Andes had left 
our feet no fit standing-place, even after soaking them in the Chota ; 
yet we hesitated long before attempting to clear a space to lie down. 
Luckily, I still had a candle-end in my pack. In a far corner some 
energetic traveler had built a cot of reeds laid across two sticks, but it 
had long since rotted to uselessness. Rumor had it that the negroes 
of Chota were skilled assassins, and the demeanor of the hamlet was 
by no means reassuring. We laid our weapons beside us on the stone 
floor, but dared not close the door for feai of drowning in our own 
sweat. All the night through I woke frequently with the sensation 

122 



DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

of some one creeping in upon us, but dawn broke without any defi- 
nite proof that the peril had been anything worse than the offspring 
of an overheated imagination. 

It would be task enough to climb from Chota to Ibarra on the 
strength of a hearty meal ; to make it from a lazy negro village, where 
not even a swallow of coffee was to be had, approached torture. 
Hour after hour we toiled upward through a choking desert of sand 
and broken stone, pitched at the angle of a steep stairway. There runs 
a story of the Chota, suggestive of the barrier it presents to modern 
progress. Archer Harman, the American who lifted the railway of 
Guayaquil to the plains of Quito, strolling along the streets of the 
Ecuadorian capital one day, chanced to meet M , one of his Amer- 
ican engineers. 

" M ," he said, shifting his cigar to the other cheek, " get out 

of here to-morrow morning and see what the chances are for a railroad 
to Bogota." 

The engineer sallied forth next day on muleback, with such equip- 
ment or lack thereof as can be had in Quito in a hurry. Three months 
later he rode back into the city of the equator. 

" Well, you 're back, eh ? " said his chief. " What 'd it cost us to run 
her through the Chota valley ? " 

" About seventy miles of 6% grade in shale," replied the engineer. 

'' Hum ! " said Harman, " There won't be any railroad to Bogota." 

Which is one of the many reasons why the nebulous " Pan-American 
Railway " still exists only in the minds of inexperienced dreamers. 

Hours up, we began to pass groups of meek, well-built Indians, easily 
distinguishable by their costume from the tribes to the north. They 
spoke a guttural yet sibilant language that could be none other than 
Ouichua, the ancient tongue of the Incas, and I took occasion to test 
the vocabulary we had gleaned, by putting an unnecessary question : 

" Maypi nan Ibarrataf " 

To which the oldest of the group replied at once in fluent, though 
accented Spanish, without the shadow of a smile: 

" Si, sefior, this is the road to Ibarra ; derechito — straight ahead." 

Before noon we were sharing a gallon of chicha at the top of the 
range, several world-famous volcanoes thrusting their white heads 
through the clouds about us. Ibarra and her fertile green slopes were 
plainly visible ; a dozen villages dotted the far-reaching landscape, and 
the two roads to Quito wound away over the opposite flanks of cloud- 
capped Imbabura, towering into the sky beyond and cutting off half the 

123 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

southern horizon. Below us spread the famous Yaguarcocha, the 
" Lake of Blood." At the height of his power Huayna Ccapac, thir- 
teenth Inca, had pushed his conquests over the equator, when the Car- 
anquis, a warlike tribe of the valley before us, revolted. The army 
sent against them exterminated the Caranqui warriors and threw their 
bodies into the lake, " turning its waters blood-red," according to the 
legend, and giving it the name it bears to this day. Its shores were 
white with encrusted salt and, like so many lakes of the Andean high- 
lands, so completely surrounded by reedy swamps that we were forced 
to abandon the swim we had promised ourselves before entering the 
principal city of Ecuador north of the capital. 

Ibarra is a still and dignified old town of some 12,000 inhabitants, 
founded in 1606 under the Spanish viceroy from whom it took its 
name, as a residence for the white men of the region between Pasto 
and Quito, on the site of the old Indian village of Caranqui. In spite 
of the extreme fertility of the surrounding valley and its peerless 
climate, many of its houses stood empty, and several buildings of 
colonial days were still the ruins the great earthquake of many years 
ago had left them. The keeper of the little eating-house that actually 
and publicly announced itself, abandoned to us her own quarters, 
densely furnished with photographs, frail chairs, tables, sofas, cane 
lounge, and an immense canopied bed, to say nothing of the extraor- 
dinary luxury of a newspaper only two days old. To offset the 
pleasure of the first real bed in weeks, however, the town kept us 
awake most of the night with a local fiesta. We had been so lacking 
in foresight as to arrive on the day sacred to the " Virgen de la 
Merced." The celebration began early in the afternoon. An endless 
train of Indians in a bedlam of colors trooped across the town under 
great bundles of dry brush gathered far away in the hills, a haughty 
chief on horseback riding up and down the line giving his orders in 
sputtering Quichua. Men, women, and children deposited their loads 
on the bare plaza before a weather-tarnished old church, and ambled 
away for more. Five immense heaps had been laid out in the form 
of a cross when a priest sallied forth to sprinkle them with holy water. 
In the thickening dusk the entire town gathered amid a deafening din 
of battered church bells, the explosion of thousands of home-made fire- 
works and " cannon crackers," the blare of a tireless band, and the 
howling of the populace and its swarming curs. The brush cross was 
lighted by a priest in rich vestments, and a pandemonium that may have 
been pleasing to the sleepless Virgin raged the whole night through. 

124 



DOWN THE ANDES TO QUITO 

The driftwood of the festival, in the form of chicha victims sprawled 
on their backs in streets and gutters, littered the town when we set out 
to climb to the frozen equator at Cayambe. A wide highway strode up 
through the Indian town of Caranqui, birthplace of Atahuallpa, best 
loved son of Huayna Ccapac and of Paccha, daughter of the conquered 
Scyri who once ruled the territory of the Quitus, and away due south- 
ward over the left shoulder of Imbabura. For the first miles it was 
so crowded with Indians in crude red blankets,. heavy, gray felt hats, 
and bare legs, that it seemed the migration of some tribe from an- 
other wo^fd. All sidestepped like Hindu coolies and even the women 
touched their hats to us as they passed, greeting us sometimes in 
Spanish, but more often in Quichua. To the west rose the snow-topped 
peak of Cotacache, sharp as a dog's tooth, and the view of Ibarra and 
her fertile valley opened up below and behind us like an unfolding map. 
Then a ridge wiped out town and jogging Indians, and left us only 
the gaunt, spreading mountain world to look upon. 

Thirty miles lay behind us when we entered Cayambe, a drowsy, 
tumble-down place of no great size, the chill of the blue ice-fields cap- 
ping the great volcano of the same name that bulks into the heavens 
close beside it, sweeping through the dreary streets unhampered. Next 
day a long and tiresome eight leagues led across a desolate and parched 
country, fissured by enormous earthquake cracks. But for the dis- 
covery of a new drink, — guarango, of unknown concoction — we 
might have stumbled across the sand-blown equator in far worse state 
than those who first pass it within the realms of Father Neptune. A 
drought had fallen upon the region so long since that even the cactus 
had given up in despair. All day long Cayambe stood forth clear 
and blue over our left shoulders, and far off to the hazy southwest 
the horizon was walled by a vast range, the highest point of which 
was evidently Pichincha, at the foot of which lay the end of our pres- 
ent journey. 

With our goal so near at hand, we found it difficult to hold our- 
selves overnight in the semi-tropical oasis of Guayllabamba, the sandy 
streets of which were half paved with the stones of alligator pears. 
By daylight we had descended to the river and begun the unbroken 
climb of more than 5000 feet to the top of the succeeding range. A 
wide highway now led due west between cactus hedges through a coun- 
try so desert dry that both stock and people seemed to be choking ; and 
the fear came upon us that Quito, too, would be suffering such a 
famine of thirst that our plan to take up temporary residence fhere 

125 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

would turn to disappointment. Another steep, tongue-parching climb 
brought to view all Pichincha and its surrounding world, yet nowhere 
was there any sign of Quito. The highway swung south, rising and 
falling gently here and there between dry fields fenced with cactus or 
mud walls, a town tucked away in the wrinkle of the range beside us. 
In a shelter at the roadside an Indian woman, selling steaming soup with 
a bit of meat and tiny potatoes in it, served us in a single earthenware 
plate with wooden spoons as impassively as she did her own people. 
Further on, groups of aborigines were burning off, over brush fires, the 
bristles of slaughtered pigs that lay in batches of a half-dozen, split 
open, at the road edge. A carriage passed, the first we had seen in 
weeks ; then an automobile ; a man in " European " clothes, wearing 
shoes, yet actually walking; a clean child of well-to-do parents. A 
motley crowd, chiefly Indians in gaudy ponchos, came and went ; large 
buildings grew up on either side of us; the highway, passing through 
green groves of eucalyptus pungent with the smell of " Australian 
gum," took on the name of " 18th of September," — though it was really 
the 26th — and all at once Quito in its May-like afternoon burst out 
before us in its mountain hollow, a great grassy mound cutting off the 
horizon on the south. Fifty-seven days had passed since we had 
walked out of the central plaza of Bogota, during fifteen of which we 
had done no walking. Our pedometer reported the distance thence 
844 miles, and we had each spent a dollar for each day of the jour- 
ney. Hays had set out weighing 180, and I, 160; we arrived weigh- 
ing 160 and 161, respectively. We may not have presented quite so 
bedraggled an appearance as the remnant of Gonzalo Pizarro's band 
on their return from the wilderness of the Amazon, but we were cer- 
tainly no fit subjects for a drawing-room. 



126 



CHAPTER VI 

THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

I SETTLED down for months in Quito. Not only were my Canal 
Zone experiences to be written, but I had long since planned 
to become a bona fide resident of a typical small South Ameri- 
can capital. A letter of introduction won me quarters in the home of 
Sefior Don Francisco Ordonez V, in the calle Flores, while Hays hung 
up his hat in even more sumptuous surroundings around the corner. 

But not so fast ! Not even whole-hearted " Don Panchito " would 
have received me in the state of sartorial delapidation of our arrival. 
The people of Quito are somewhat less rigid disciples of Beau Brummel 
than those of Bogota, but they are still far from negligent in dress. 
Most of the clothes indispensible to our entrance into the ranks of the 
gente decente had been mailed in Jirardot, the rest had been turned 
over to the American " drummer " in Cali. The first shock Quito had 
in store for us was the information that no parcel of any shape or 
description had come from Colombia in months, the second was the 
discovery that the traveling-man had not arrived. It was hard to 
realize that we had outwalked all the established means of transporta- 
tion in this equatorial land. 

An unavoidable round of the shops wiped out the remnant of my 
savings as a policeman, and brought me down again to the letter of 
credit that had lain fallow more than a half year. Except for tailor- 
made suits, the cost of replenishing a wardrobe was startling. Ready- 
made clothing for men is rare in the cities of the Andes, and it is 
far more economical to be fitted to order in one of the sastrerias that 
abound in almost every street, — dingy little rooms, their fronts all door- 
way, in which sit anemic half-breed youths sewing languidly, yet in- 
cessantly, now and then carrying the charcoal-filled " goose " out into 
the street to blow out the ashes, and as dependent on the passing throng 
for inspiration as the craftsmen of Damascus. As in the more north- 
ern capital, the chief line of demarkation between the gente and the 
pueblo of Quito is the white collar. Naturally, the tendency is to make 
it as wide and distinct as possible. I had canvassed the entire city 
before I found my customary brand of neckwear — at four times its 

127 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

American price — only to discover that the lowest collar in stock was 
designed for some species of human giraffe. 

" You misunderstand me," I protested, " I did not ask for a cuff." 

" This is a collar, sefior," cried the shopkeeper. 

" Something lower, please." 

" But this is a very low collar ! It is so low that no one in Quito 
will wear it, and we are not importing any more of this brand." 

In the matter of shoes, I found at last a Massachusetts product 
that might have served; but when I had beaten the dealer down to 
about twice the American price, a seven was found to be the largest 
size in stock. The merchant seemed on the verge of tears. 

" Why, sefior," he gasped, gazing resentfully at the offending mem- 
ber, " there is not a foot in Quito as large as that shoe." 

He did not mean exactly what he said, but it was natural that he 
should have had in mind only the minority of quietenos who wear 
shoes. These squeeze their feet into articles of effeminate, toothpick 
shape for custom's sake, as they force their necks into collars that 
come little short of hanging, and have their trousers made sailor- 
fashion, that their feet may look still more ladylike. One cannot, of 
course, pose as an aristocrat on the broad hoofs of an Indian. In the 
end I was forced to submit to botas de hide, an imitation patent-leather 
shoe made in Guayaquil. 

Hays concluded that with a general overhauling he could pass muster 
until our bundles arrived. But on one point immediate renewal was 
unavoidable. He paused in the doorway of one of the little sewing 
dens to ask: 

" Can you make me a pair of trousers by Saturday night?" 

In spite of having pillowed for weeks on Ramsey, Hays never could 
remember that Castilian trousers come singly. 

" Un par, sefior ! " cried the tailor, " Ah, no, that is impossible so 
soon. I can make you a trouser by then, but not two of them. Then, 
while you are wearing the one, I can perhaps make the other, if the 
sefior is in such haste." 

" Oh, all right," said Hays, suddenly recalling that trousers are — I 
mean is — singular in Spanish, " go ahead. I '11 try to get along with 
one over Sunday." 

The error persisted, however. It was not three days later that he 
was halted at the door of his lodgings by a whining beggar. 

" Una caridad, caballero ! Have you not perhaps some old clothes 
to give a poor unfortunate? " 

128 




A view of Quito, backed by the Panecillo that bottles it up on the south. 

conventos in sight 



There are six 




A patio of the Monastery of San Francisco, one of the eighteen monasteries and convents 
of Quito, said to be the most extensive in the Western Hemisphere 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

. " Sure," said the generous ex-corporal of police. " I '11 bring you 
down a pair of trousers." 

He did so, whereupon the beggar growled angrily: 
" But you said a pair ! Where is the other one ? " 
Few quiteno dwellings are equipped with bathrooms. I halted a 
passerby to inquire for a public casa de banos, and was directed to the 
foot of the calle Rocafuerte. 

" Hot baths ? " I queried, suspiciously. 

" Certainly, sefior," he answered haughtily ; " If you go there any 
morning about ten, when the sun is shining, you will find them quite 
caliente." 

A crumbling old adobe gate, marked " Banos de Milagro," gave en- 
trance to an aged two-story building of the same material. Passing 
through this, I was astonished to find spread out before me what looked 
like an immense outdoor swimming-pool. It was illusion. Nearer 
approach showed a broad sheet of water barely six inches deep, a half- 
acre of it warming in the sun. I suddenly recalled that the same word 
serves in Spanish for all degrees of temperature from hot to luke- 
warm. About the basin were many little adobe dens, in the center of 
each a stone basin some four feet deep, with steps leading down into 
it. The fee was a mere real (five cents), for the streams that course 
down the face of Pichincha are abundant. An Indian scrubbed out 
the pool with a broom fashioned from a. bundle of fagots, and turned 
it full of a water so clear that I could have read a newspaper at the 
bottom. But the heating apparatus was not particularly effective. 
When the icy mountain water had filled the stone basin, cold as only a 
shaded spot at this altitude can be, the uninured gringo could only grit 
his teeth, clutch desperately at his 6o-cent bar of imported English 
soap, and plunge in — and quickly out again. One such experience 
was enough to explain why Quito shows so decided an aversion to the 
bath. 

My residence in the city was all but nipped in the bud by a mere 
matter of red tape. Again the shock was administered at the post- 
office. When I presented the registry slips for the package of notes 
on which my proposed volume depended, they were all there, sure 
enough, the seals still unbroken. But as I opened them for cus- 
toms inspection, the startled employees cried out in horrified 
chorus : 

" Sefior, it is against the law to send manuscript by mail in Ecua- 
dor!" 

129 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

" These were mailed in the United States, where it is not against the 
law." 

"No importa! It is illegal for them to ride in the Ecuadorian 
mails. They will have to be confiscated by the government." 

" What can the government do with them? " I asked, innocently. 

" Burn them, of course," replied the clerk. 

Luckily the laws of Ecuador are not so inexorable and incorruptible 
as those of some other lands, but I passed a far from pleasant hour be- 
fore I discovered that saving fact. Just where the line is drawn 
between " manuscrito " and mere letters, I was never able to learn. 
At any rate the sender of the offending notes is still " wanted," I be- 
lieve, to serve a year in the penitentiary of Quito. 

I had not been three days in the city of the equator when I began 
to feel the necessity for exercise. The " best families " lead a very 
sedentary and physically idle existence, virtually spending their lives 
at the bottom of a hole in the ground, for such the central plaza and 
the few adjoining squares about which it is customary to stroll might 
be called. Yet there are innumerable views and picturesque corners to 
reward him who will climb out; and climb he must, for the city lies in 
a fold of the skirts of Pichincha, out of which almost every street 
mounts more or less steeply. 

The main plaza is the heart of Ecuador. In its center, instead of 
the " handsome brass fountain " of Stevenson's day, rises a tall, showy 
monument topped by a bronze Victory or Liberty, or some other exotic 
bird, while at its base cringes an allegorical Spanish lion with a look 
of pained disgust on his face and an arrow through his liver. Much 
of the square is floored with cement, blinding to the eyes under the 
equatorial sun and only mildly relieved by staid and too carefully 
tended plots where violets, pansies, yellow poppies, and many a flower 
known only to the region bloom perennially. Its diagonal walks see 
most of Quito pass at least once a day. But neither Indians nor the 
ragged classes pause to sit on its grass-green benches ; nor may anyone 
carrying a bundle pass its gates — unless the guard chances to be doing 
something other than his appointed duty. On the east the square is 
flanked by the two-story government " palace," housing the presidency, 
the ministry, both houses of congress, the custom-house, Ecuador's 
main post-office, and considerable else, yet still finding room for sev- 
eral cubby-hole shops under its portico. To the south, siding on, 
rather than facing the square, its towers barely rising above the roof, 
is the low cathedral, in which are the tombs both of Sucre and his 

130 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

reputed assassin, Flores, the " Washington of Ecuador." The third 
and fourth sides are flanked by the archbishop's palace and the 
municipality, both with portales, arcades beneath which are dozens 
of little den-like shops, and filled from pillar to pillar with hawkers 
and their no less motley wares. 

Every street of the city is roughly cobbled, with a row of flagstones 
along its center for Indian carriers and four-footed beasts of burden, 
and on either side a narrow, slanting slab-stone walk on which the 
pedestrian whose appearance suggests the lower social standing is ex- 
pected to yield the passage. Rambling over a rolling, at times almost 
hilly site, every street is due sooner or later to run off into the air on 
a hillside, or to fade suddenly away into a noisome lane. 

Quito has no residential section. Its chiefly two-story buildings are, 
with rare exceptions, constructed of mud blocks on frames of chaguar- 
quero, the light, pithy stalk of the giant cactus, with roofs of the famil- 
iar dull-red tiles. Whitewash and paint of many colors strive in vain 
to conceal this plebeian material, and many a facade is gay with orna- 
mentation. Well-to-do people, who are commonly the owners of the 
building they dwell in, occupy the second floor. The lower story of 
the city is the business section. That portion of the house facing the 
street is almost certain to be given over to from one to several shops, 
the patio serving as a yard for the loading and unloading of pack- 
animals, while the bare adobe cells opening on it house the family 
servants and Indian retainers. To dwell almost anywhere in Quito is 
to live in the upper air of a combination of slums and business houses, 
and whatever the wealth or boasted aristocracy of a family, it is certain 
to come into daily contact with the unwashed gente del pueblo that in- 
habits its lower regions and performs its menial tasks. 

There are shops enough in Quito, to all appearances, to supply the 
demands, if not the needs, of all the million and a half inhabitants of 
Ecuador. These are, for the most part, small, one-room dungeons 
without windows, flush with the sidewalk, with no other front than the 
doors that stand wide open during business hours, and present at other 
times their blank faces ornamented with several enormous padlocks. 
The quitefio puts no trust in the small locks of modern days. Many a 
shop, the entire stock of which is not worth a hundred dollars, is pro- 
tected not only by bolts and bars within, but by half a dozen of those 
huge and clumsy contrivances that the rest of the world used in the 
Middle Ages. To " shut up shop " is a real task in Quito, of which the 
lugging home of the enormous keys is by no means the least burden- 

131 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

some. Naturally, if a real burglar cared to take the trouble to journey 
to Quito, he would find far less difficulty at his trade than in a city os- 
tensibly less secure. 

Besides the establishments of hundreds of men who would rather 
wear a white collar than work, there are innumerable little holes in 
the wall, run by " women of the people " in conjunction with their 
scanty household duties, where chicha and stronger drinks, and the few 
food-stuffs of the Indians and the poorer classes are displayed — and 
sometimes sold, though there are barely customers enough to go round. 
Clothing stores, or more exactly, clothshops, are perhaps most numer- 
ous, countless useless duplications of the selfsame stock, with hundreds 
of bolts of as many different weaves piled high in the open doorways. 
Every merchant, however meager his supplies, announces himself an 
" importer and exporter," and after morning mass manto-wrapped 
women wander for hours from shop to shop, haggling for a fancied 
difference of a half cent in some purchase which, in the end, is more 
apt than not to be abandoned. Business is petty at best ; its ethics low, 
and the native quiteno is a weak competitor of the foreigners that 
swafm in the city. Italians, especially the wily Neapolitan, and 
" Turks," as the ubiquitous Syrians are called in all South America, 
capture much of the trade. A foreigner remains a foreigner in Ecua- 
dor, for the country has but weak powers of assimilation. 

A unique note in the life of Quito are the " Propiedad " signs. 
Revolution, with its accompanying looting, is ever imminent. The na- 
tive shopkeepers are frankly at the mercy of the looters, who only too 
often are the Government itself. But the foreigner despoiled of his 
wares can always lodge a complaint with his home Government ; repar- 
ation may follow, and even the punishment of the looters is conceiv- 
able. To warn these of their peril, and to induce sober thought in 
times of anarchy, the foreign merchant paints on his shop-front a huge 
flag of his country, similar to that used by neutral steamers in war- 
time, with surcharged words conveying the same information to those 
unacquainted with the colors. Thus the German's place of business is 
distinguished with a: 



(black) 
PROPIEDAD 



(white) 
ALEMANA 

(red) 

132 







The family of " Don Panchito " with whom I lived in Quito. In front stands little Mercedes, 
familiarly known as " Meech, " our house-maid and general servant 




Girls of the "gente decente" class of Quito, in a school run by European nuns. 
Superior (right) is Belgian; the nun on the left is Irish 



The Mother 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

Within a few blocks of the main plaza may be noted the following 
" Propiedades " : " Espanola, Francesa, Alemana, Belga, Danesa, 
Inglesa, Italiana, Holondesa, Sueca, Chilena, Colombiana, Peruana, 
Venezolana, Turca," and one or two more. The Stars and Stripes and 
the words " Propiedad Americana " appear only once — on the door of 
a small export house. 

Apparently every one is entitled to three guesses on the population 
of Quito. The estimates range from fifty to a hundred thousand, with 
the truth probably somewhere near the seventy-five thousand attributed 
to it in Stevenson's day. Its tendency of late years has been to over- 
flow its banks ; the suburb of Guarico climbs a considerable way up the 
skirts of Pichincha, and the huts of Indians have scrambled well up the 
flanks of the other enclosing ridges. Though more in touch with the 
outside world than Bogota, it has much the same atmosphere of a 
world apart, a peaceful, restful little sphere supplied with a few mod- 
ern conveniences of a crude, break-down-often sort, but with little of 
the complicated life of twentieth-century cities. It is a splendid place 
to play at life, to lie fallow and catch up with oneself, with nothing 
more exciting to stir up existence than the semi-weekly concert in the 
plaza mayor. A score of carriages rattle over its cobbled streets; the 
rails of a tramway line had been laid years before our arrival, but the 
cars had not yet been ordered. Somewhere there may be a finer cli- 
mate, but it would scarcely be worth while going far to look for it. 
Standing at a height which, in the temperate zone, would be covered by 
eternal snows, the city is sheltered by the surrounding ranges from 
the bitter chill that descends so often upon less lofty Bogota. In the 
Colombian capital we were always suffering more or less from cold in 
our waking hours, except at midday; in Quito it was possible to sit 
comfortably on a plaza bench at midnight. With all the stages of 
nature, from planting through blossoms, fruit, and harvest, existing 
side by side, its days are like the best half-dozen culled from a north- 
ern May. There is a popular saying that it rains thirteen months a 
year in Quito. But this is slander. During my long stay, there were, 
to be sure, few days when it did not rain ; but the shower came almost 
always at a more or less fixed hour of the afternoon, and the resident 
soon learned to make his plans accordingly. The rain seemed heavier 
than it was in reality, for tin spouts pour the water noisily out into the 
cobbled streets, the wide, projecting eaves protecting the sidewalks. 
Now and then came a day heavy with massed clouds ; far more often 
all but an hour or so was brilliant with sunshine. 

133 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

Yet an American schoolma'am accustomed to tell her pupils that 
the people of Quito all dress in white because it lies on the equator, 
would be startled to see what attention even a woman in light-colored 
garb attracts in its streets. On rare occasions a man in white cotton 
passed through the overcoated plaza during the evening concert; but 
this meant only that the tri-weekly train from Guayaquil had arrived. 
We met, too, an American " drummer," more noted for his ability as a 
" mixer " than for his knowledge of geography, who had arrived with 
a carefully chosen wardrobe of white linen suits — and proved a god- 
send to the local tailors. Incidentally, he had come down to introduce 
American plumbing in Ecuador; but that is another and still sadder 
story. The truth is that moderate winter clothing is never out of 
place in the city of the equator. Even at noon, with one's shadow a 
round disk under foot and the sun glaring to the eyes and burning the 
skin in this thin, upland air, a leisurely climb up one of the longest 
streets brought no memories of the tropics. 

As in all high altitudes, there is a marked difference between sun- 
shine and shade. The first greeting in a quitefio house is sure to be 
" Cubrese usted " (" Put on your hat "), and however impolite it may 
seem to the newcomer, none but the unwise will disregard the sug- 
gestion. Only when one has become acclimated to the room may one 
uncover with impunity, for to catch cold in Quito is a serious matter, 
and the road from a cold to pneumonia is short and swift in this 
thin air. Thanks to the altitude, it is the common experience of new- 
comers to be either unduly exhilarated or sunk in the depths of de- 
spondency. 

There is not a chimney in Quito, and no breath of smoke is ever 
known to smudge her transparent equatorial sky. Factories, in the 
modern sense, are unknown ; cooking is the same simple operation as in 
the rural districts of the Andes. The quiteho knows artificial heat, if 
at all, only by hearsay. I chanced to be in the reception-room of the 
Minister of Foreign Affairs one afternoon when a newly appointed 
Argentine ambassador dropped in for his first informal call. In the 
course of the polished small-talk that ensued, the diplomat mentioned a 
new law in Buenos Aires requiring the heating of public buildings dur- 
ing certain months of the year. The Minister, an unusually well-edu- 
cated man for Ecuador, stared a moment with a puzzled expression, 
then leaning forward with undiplomatic eagerness, replied : 

" Why, I suppose you would have to have some kind of artificial 
heat in those cold countries ! " 

134 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

From the center of the city itself not one of the snow-clad volcanoes 
that encircle it like the tents of a besieging army are visible; but a 
climb to the rim of the basin in any direction leads to some point of 
vantage overlooking all Quito and its surroundings. Of a score of 
far-reaching views, that is perhaps most striking from the summit 
of the Panecillo. The " Little Loaf " that bottles up the town on the 
south is well-named; it resembles nothing so much as a fat biscuit, 
lush green in its covering of perpetual spring. Antiquarians have 
never agreed whether the Panecillo is a natural hill, or partly or wholly 
built by man. Geologically it is out of place, for all the rest of the 
region is rocky and broken, and nowhere else in the vicinity has na- 
ture constructed any symmetrical thing. Some have it that an already 
existing hill was rounded off before the Conquest, as a pedestal for the 
Temple of the Sun which tradition asserts adorned the summit long 
before the coming of the Incas. If it is entirely man-built, the con- 
struction of the pyramids was an afternoon sport in comparison. 
Somehow the imagination likes to picture thousands of Indians of both 
sexes and all ages jogging like lines of tropical ants up and down the 
sacred mound, with baskets of earth on their uncomplaining backs, as 
they still trot to-day through the streets of Quito under loads of every 
description. 

A road runs round and round the Panecillo, making two full revolu- 
tions in so leisurely and dignified a manner that it would seem almost 
level did not the city below open out more and more with each step 
forward. At the summit, across which sweeps a never-failing wind 
from the south, is a view worth many times such a climb. All Quito 
lies huddled in its pocket below, like the body of a dull-red spider with 
its legs cut off at varying lengths. The city is clearly visible in its 
every detail, from the very roof-tiles of its houses to the gay-colored 
ponchos of the Indians, crawling like minute specks across its squares 
and along its ditch-like streets. Along the earth-wrinkle at the base 
of Pichincha's long ridge are glimpses of small villages, and countless 
little green fields, standing edge-up on the flank of the range, seem so 
close at hand as to be almost within touch. Here the early riser may 
watch the birth of clouds. At sunrise the Andes stand out sharp and 
clear, as if the sky had been carefully swept during the night. Then 
a tiny patch of mist detaches itself here and there from the damp 
flanks of Pichincha, streaks of steel-gray clouds begin to rise under 
the warming sun, like a curtain drawn from the bottom; soon the 
entire ridge is steaming from end to end, and before one's very eyes 

135 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

come into being and float away across the world those masses of clouds 
that greet the late riser full-grown. 

In the transparent air of the highlands the eye embraces far more 
than the city. The surrounding world, being above the tree-line, is 
bare of any vegetation other than the brown bunch-grass ; as would be 
the city and its environs, also, but for the thousands of eucalyptus trees 
imported in the days of Garcia Moreno. Swinging round the circle, 
one catches sight of a dozen famous volcanoes, all more or less capped 
with snow. Almost due north rises the glacier-clad bulk of Cayambe, 
squatted squarely on the equator, perhaps forty miles away, yet seem- 
ing just over the ridge beyond the city. Near it, jagged Cotacache 
pierces the blue heavens. Further around comes Antisana, then Sin- 
cholagua, the giant that not many years ago blew its head off in a fit of 
rage. To the east stands Pasochoa, close followed by Ruminaui, the 
" Stony-Eyed," of the same name as the Inca-quitefio general who con- 
tinued the war against the Spaniards after the capture of Atahuallpa. 
Over its shoulder peers the tip of Cotapaxi ; little Corazon comes next, 
with Iliniza striving in vain to hide behind it, until finally the eye has 
swung back to the broad flanks of Pichincha, up which clamber Indian 
huts, like captive turtles striving to escape from their enclosing basin. 
Above them two ragged rock and lava peaks, often streaked with snow, 
the Rucu and Guagua ("Man" and "Baby") Pichincha, invisible 
from the city itself, stand forth close at hand against the chill steel- 
blue of the upland sky. Pichincha is rated a dead volcano, having 
given no signs of life since 1660; but the early history of Quito 
is stfewn with its ashes and destruction. Quitenos are much given to 
bewailing their " triste " landscape ; yet few of her canvases has Na- 
ture painted with so masterly a hand. 

Three weeks after our arrival Hays burst in upon me one morning 
with the information that the bundles we had mailed in Jirardot had 
come. Well on in the afternoon the post-office officials saw fit to lay 
them before us. A ragged boy cut the strings and spread out the con- 
tents for customs inspection. This over, we were preparing to carry 
them off, when we were halted by the grunt of an official deep in some 
long arithmetical process at a nearby desk. By and by he rose and 
pushed toward each of us a long list of figures : 

" Mercancias (Merchandise) — 8500 grams. 

" Derechos (Duty) thereon at $2 a kilogram $ 17.00 

Mas 100% (Plus 100%) 17.00 

Defensa Nacional 1.70 

136 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

Aforro • $ 1.57 

Muellaje (wharfage) 2.23 

Bodega (storage) 93 

Brokerage 2.30 

Timbre (stamp) 15 

Total $ 42.88 

" These are personal belongings, chiefly clothing, all more or less 
worn," I began, scenting a long controversy. 

" True, senor." 

" You surely do not ask us to pay duty on personal baggage ? Trav- 
elers arrive at Guayaquil every week with several trunks, and pay no 
duty." 

" Only that is baggage which the traveler personally brings in with 
him. The charges are $42.88 — for each, sefiores, since the parcels 
are of the same weight." 

" But you can see for yourself that they are marked ' Value $7.' " 

" The law goes by weight only, senor." 

"Why the 100% addition?" 

" The new law requires all duties to be levied twice." 

"Arid this third item?" 

" For the up-keep of the national army and navy." 

"Well, what is this aforro?" 

" That is the freight from Panama." 

" But the postage was prepaid from Jirardot to Quito — one dol- 
lar. Doesn't Ecuador belong to the Postal Union?" 

" Naturally, senor, but by a special treaty with the United States 
parcel-post packages pay freight across the Isthmus, and from Panama 
to here." 
• " And this muellage — ? " 

" The landing charges in the port of Guayaquil. Bodega is for 
warehouse storage charges — " 

" But the bundles came through in a mail-bag, without so much as 
entering a warehouse." 

" Those are fixed charges, irrespective of special conditions. The 
brokerage covers my fee here in the office, and the stamp is that which 
you see on the document here. The total charges are $42.88." 

" Keep 'em," growled Hays, turning away. " Make a present of 
them to your president, or dress up one of your statues of Liberty." 
Naturally, he spoke in English, for we still planned to live some time in 
Quito. 

137 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

As we reached the door, a word from the official caused us to turn 
back. He was up to his ears in another set of figures. 

" We can call it cotton instead of clothing," he said, presenting a new 
list; "then the charges will be only $12.25." 

" Make it old clothing," suggested Hays. 

" The law mentions clothing, without qualifications," replied the of- 
ficial, with that patient courtesy that is the chief virtue of his race. 

" The bundles do not weigh that, anyway," I persisted. " Most of it 
is in the wrappings." 

" The law specifies bulk, not net weight." 

" Keep them, with our compliments," growled Hays, turning away. 

" I '11 tell you what you can do, sefiores," suggested the official ; 
" Go buy a stamped sheet of government paper at thirty cents and write 
the Director of Posts — " 

" Why can't we write him on ordinary paper ? " 

" It would not be legal. Go buy a thirty-cent stamped paper and 
put a ten-cent stamp on it — " 

"What's that for?" 

" For the up-keep of the national army. Write the Director of Posts 
reclaiming the duty you have paid — " 

" After we have paid it ? " cried Hays. " Hardly ! I have had too 
much experience with Latin-American governments." 

In the end we bought the stamped paper and wrote the director, 
leaving the letter with the official, who promised to forward it to his 
chief — to-morrow. As the bundles contained some rather indispens- 
able odds and ends, and because I wished to investigate Ecuadorian 
government processes to the bottom, I followed the matter up. Next 
day we called twice at the post-office and finally, late in the afternoon, 
signed a blank request to be given the packages duty free, without 
which, it appeared, the matter could not be officially considered. Two 
days later we were informed that a junta had been ordered to meet and 
pass on the case ; there being no precedent for action. A week passed. 
The junta showed no ability to get together. I took up the quest 
again — and spent an afternoon in gaining admittance to the sanctum 
of the Director of Posts. He was courtesy itself, but the gist of his 
remarks was : 

" That is not baggage which comes in by mail. It is only legally so 
when it crosses the frontier with its owner. However, if you wish, 
you might call on the Minister of Public Instruction — who happens to 
be also at the present time acting Minister of the Interior, to which de- 

138 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

partment the matter refers — and ask to have the bundles passed as 
baggage." 

I spent the better part of two days in the anteroom of the Ministry, 
a sumptuous pink and blue adobe chamber with a score of bullet holes 
in the walls — mementoes of the latest request of the populace for the 
resignation of the president — only to learn: 

" The law mentions no difference between old and new clothing ; be- 
tween fresh and soiled linen. All clothing entering Ecuador — ex- 
cept as baggage — pays the same duty; hence I see no way you can 
avoid it." 

I did not succeed in getting the matter before Congress — officially, 
at least — though I only missed taking it up with the president through 
an oversight of one of his aids. In the end I paid the $6.25 to which, 
by some strange manipulation, the post-office official had reduced the 
charges, and carried the object of controversy home to the calle 
Flores. 

These small countries of tropical America remind one less of na- 
tions than of groups of polite bandits who have taken possession of a 
few mountains and valleys that they may levy tribute on whoever falls 
into their hands. All of them have imitated larger powers by enacting 
a " protective tariff," without even the scant excuse that has been 
bloated into a reason for it in other lands; for here there is no 
industry to " protect." Here it is not the lobbies of large financial in- 
terests that are back of the movement, but the politicians who consti- 
tute the " government " ; the tariffs are " for revenue only " — largely 
for the pockets of the politicians themselves. We of more powerful 
nations hardly realize what it means to live in so small a country as 
Ecuador, until it is brought home by some such incident as hearing 
the entire Congress debating several hours on the questton of whether 
two new electric-light bulbs shall or shall not be placed in front of the 
government " palace." 

Religiously, Quito is still in the Middle Ages. Looked down upon 
from any point of vantage, it has the aspect of an ecclesiastical capital. 
It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that half the city is taken 
up by the Church. Besides its many bulking " temples " and innumer- 
able chapels, enormous sections of the town are swallowed up within 
the confines of convents and monasteries. The largest is San Fran- 
cisco, reputed the most extensive in America. The Franciscans got in 
on the ground floor in Quito. The ink with which the city was 
founded was barely dry when three monks of that order arrived afoot 

139 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

and breathless from Guayaquil; to be given an immense grant of land 
running far up the flanks of Pichincha. The great stone cloisters were 
a century in building; a veritable Chinese Wall of brick, backed by 
clustered hovels of the poor, encloses what would have been six city 
blocks, and the holdings of the order in haciendas and other rich prop- 
erties spread far and wide over Ecuador. During the irruption of 
Pichincha in 1575, the Franciscans won the perennial worship of the 
masses by the simple method of raising aloft the Hostia and com- 
manding the flow of lava to cease — and continuing to hold it aloft 
until the command was obeyed. To-day they still loll under such 
withered laurels. 

Two youths of Quito's " best families " accompanied me to San 
Francisco. A monk in brown greeted my companions as befitted their 
high rank and potential power of beneficence ; yet with an undercurrent 
of insincerity and of dislike for these sons of " Liberals," which he 
was unable wholly to conceal. We passed through several flowery 
patios musical with fountains and surrounded by pillared arcades, off 
which opened large, vaulted chambers, to an Elysian orchard under the 
trees of which a score of well-fed, well-slept monks strolled in pastoral 
contentment far from the hubbub and cares of the modern world. 
Cigarette butts littered the floor of a kiosk in the center; scarcely a 
face was to be seen in which the signs of frequent debauch could not 
plainly be read. The walls and ceiling of the adjoining church were 
so covered with gold that the imagination harked back to the ransom 
of Atahuallpa. My companions whispered that an American had re- 
cently offered $15,000 for the privilege of removing what remained of 
the genuine metal, promising to regild the church so expertly that the 
transaction would never be detected. The offer had been considered, 
but declined when some suspicion of the deal reached the public ear. 
The monks were still open to similar propositions, however. Over a 
door of the monastery hung an old painting of " Maria Dolorosa " by 
a famous Spanish artist. One of my companions, himself a painter of 
some ability, offered a tempting sum for permission to replace the 
" dusty old thing " with a brand new copy ; and the impression left by 
a deal of murmuring and pantomime was that the offer would eventually 
be accepted. 

When we asked permission to climb to the tower for a view of the 
town, however, the monk gave us a quick, sidelong glance and re- 
gretted that the Father Superior no longer permitted it. My com- 
panions exchanged winks, but found no opportunity to enlighten me 

140 




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THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

until we had taken our ceremonious leave. Once outside I learned — 
to my astonishment — that not merely foreigners resent having each 
night's sleep broken up into a series of detached naps by the unearthly 
din of Quito's church-bells. A few months before, several young 
men of the well-to-do class had formed a conspiracy to taste the un- 
known luxury of one night of unbroken slumber. Gaining admission 
on various pretexts to all the church-towers of the city, the conspira- 
tors had stolen the badajos — clappers, I believe we call them in 
English — and got rid of them so effectually that few were ever dis- 
covered. The priests were distracted — until their faithful hench- 
men of the masses had replaced the pilfered property with pieces of 
railroad iron. Since then the church-towers had been closed to the 
educated youth of the city. 

Not far from San Francisco rises the florid f agade of " La Com- 
pania." The Jesuits reached the present capital of Ecuador a bit later 
than many of their competitors, but they quickly overcame the handi- 
cap. They established the first boticas, or drug-stores, and brooked 
no competition. Besides enormous tracts of the most fertile land in 
the colony, they were granted a monopoly of cattle-breeding and, being 
free from taxes and the necessity of paying the King's share, and hold- 
ing the Indians in virtual slavery at less than a nominal wage, most 
of which returned to their coffers in the form of church tithes and 
levies, they easily choked private competition and soon outdistanced in 
wealth even the Franciscans. Their expulsion from Spanish soil 
greatly reduced their power and holdings. To-day, what was once a 
part of their monastery is occupied by the University and the National 
Library, but they are still scarcely cramped for space. An Alsatian 
Jesuit, of an esthetical cast of countenance in striking contrast to 
his Ecuadorian brothers, led me fearlessly even into the belfry. He 
was a plainspoken man, for all his astuteness — or perhaps by reason 
of it — and openly bewailed the immorality of the native friars and 
what he called the " silly superstitions " of the people. The dormi- 
tories of the boarding-school within the monastery were divided into 
small cells by low wooden partitions covered with chicken-wire, like 
the ten-cent lodging-houses of Chicago. Before I had time to put a 
question, the Alsatian explained: 

" In these countries we must keep the boys locked in their own 
rooms at night, for morality's sake." 

It is more than unusual in Latin-America, but at least one enter- 
prising pupil found it possible to " work his way " through the colegio 

141 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

of the Jesuit Fathers of Quito. His fame was still green among the 
gilded youths of the city. By the rules of the institution each student 
is required to go to confession once a week. The enterprising lad long 
relieved his comrades of the unpleasant formality by impersonating 
each in turn before the perforated disk — at the equivalent of fifty 
cents a head. 

Merced, Corazon, Buen Pastor, San Augustin, Santa Barbara, Santa 
Clara, Carmen Antigua, Carmen Moderno, San Juan ... to name all 
the orders that occupy huge spaces within the city of Quito would be 
like writing an ecclesiastical directory. Down at the end of the calle 
Flores the Dominicans dwell in a monastery little less extensive than 
that of the Franciscans. Their wealth may be surmised from the fact 
that in colonial days they held the monopoly of supplying all liquor 
used in " divine worship " throughout the colony. In the center of the 
Plaza Santo Domingo is a statue of Sucre, companion of Bolivar in 
the wars of Spanish-American independence, — a splendid bronze of 
an imaginary Hercules that should be set up in some gymnasium as a 
model — concerning which there runs a tale suggestive of local con- 
ditions. Soon after its erection an Indian living far up the mountain- 
side above the suburb of Guarico lost his pig. He tried every known 
means of recovering the animal, — prayed to every available saint with 
any reputation for miracles, squandered his meager substance in burn- 
ing candles before every shrine in Quito, and purchased many a 
priestly prayer. All in vain ; the pig was not to be found. At length 
a quiteno — whether a wag or a sincere believer is not reported - — 
whispered to the distracted Indian that the most powerful saint of all 
was the new one in the Plaza Santo Domingo. The credulous fellow 
lost no time on his way to the square, where he knelt with a lighted 
candle on either side of him before the pedestal of the Hero of Aya- 
cucho. When he looked up from his first invocation he noted that the 
statue was pointing to the battlefield on which its original defeated the 
Spaniards, far up the slope of Pichincha, which chanced also to be the 
location of the Indian's hut. He hurried homeward and, sure enough, 
found the pig in a hollow not far from his dwelling. Since then 
" Saint Sucre " has had a great vogue with the Indian populace of 
Quito. 

It would be out of place to enumerate the many proofs, from per- 
sonal experiences to matters of common knowledge, from national 
literature to frequent notorious scandals, of the moral laxity of the 
quiteno priesthood. Whatever they may be elsewhere, celibacy and the 

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THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

confessional are undeniably ill-chosen institutions for a race of Ecua- 
dorian caliber. The non-Catholic would not dream of berating the 
churchmen in any such terms as those which frequently fall from the 
lips of educated men of Quito. More than once I have heard a devout 
quiteha mother bewail the fact that she dare not send her daughter 
to confession, though convinced that the ceremony was requisite to 
the saving of her soul. One looks in vain for any connection what- 
ever between religion and morality in this typical Andean capital. 
The sanctimonious old beatas, wrapped in their black mantos, who 
haunt the churches and accompany every religious procession with 
tears of hysterical ecstasy coursing down their cheeks are not infre- 
quently procurers and. go-betweens of the human vultures that dwell 
in, as well as out of, the monasteries. The street-walkers of Quito 
are almost all fervent mass-goers. Scores of the same faces that peer 
invitingly out upon the passerby at night may be seen next morning 
kneeling on the pavement of the cathedral or walking on their knees 
around the entire circle of plaster saints, reciting a prayer formula be- 
fore each. Nor is this hypocrisy. These victims see no incongruity 
between the evening's doings and the morning's occupation. To the 
masses, religion is a mixture of idol worship and the performance of 
fixed ceremonies, wholly divorced from their personal actions. The 
sins of daily life are wiped out by a quarter-hour in the confessional ; 
absolution is granted for the payment of a fee and the performance of 
a set devotion. The brain cells where real morality might find a foot- 
hold are packed with absurd catechisms that leave no room for it ; and 
of religion there remains nothing but unthinking costumbre and un- 
reasoning fanaticism. 

Quito has been called the most fanatical town of South America. 
Among a score like it, the present archbishop tells the following story in 
his " History of Ecuador." About two hundred years ago some one 
broke into one of the churches and stole the sacred wafers, together 
with the gold ciborium in which they were kept. A few days later 
the stolen property was found lying in the refuse of a ditch. Amid 
great weeping, a procession of the entire population bore the sacred 
emblem back to its church. For weeks the whole town dressed in deep- 
est mourning; the audiencia gave all its attention and the police force 
all its efforts to running down those " vile traitors, bestial swine, and 
venial sinners," as the gentle archbishop calls them, leaving little mis- 
demeanors like robbery and murder to look after themselves. Not a 
clue was uncovered. At length a famous Jesuit of the time preached a 

143 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

sermon that lashed the populace into such fervor that the congregation 
poured forth into the streets beating themselves with chains and 
scourges, most of them, men and women, naked to the waist — I am 
quoting the archbishop — in a procession and religious fury that lasted 
from eight at night until two in the morning. A scapegoat was im- 
perative. The officers of the audiencia, in peril of being themselves 
forced to assume that role, redoubled their efforts, and at length found, 
some distance south of the city, three Indians and a half-caste who were 
reputed to have confessed to the nefarious crime. The four mis- 
creants were brought back to the city, kicked about the streets by the 
populace, trussed up in chains in the church while the priest preached 
a four-hour sermon on " the most atrocious crime in the history of 
Quito," and were finally hanged, drawn, and quartered, and hung up, 
still dripping with blood, in sixteen parts of the town. The priests 
and their followers dug up a potf ul of earth where the holy wafers had 
been found, and deposited it in a heavy vase of solid gold that is 
still one of the precious relics of the cathedral. Then they caused to 
be erected over the spot the chapel of Jerusalem, where it stands to 
this day. "And," adds the archbishop, "no fiel [faithful one] will 
deny that they met their just fate for so vile and unprecedented a 
sacrilege." 

Ah, but that was two centuries ago. True, but permit me to bring 
the fanaticism of Quito up to date. Less than a year before our ar- 
rival the perennial struggle between the Liberals and the Conservatives, 
the latter the church party, had broken out again in revolution. A 
queer-looking little man, with a white goatee sprouting from a mild- 
tempered chin, and wearing habitually a hat that would have been the 
envy of a slap-stick comedian, had for years been president of Ecua- 
dor. He had stolen unusually little for a Latin-American president, 
and had not allowed his friends to steal more than the average. 
Moreover, he had done the country much service, among other things 
having induced an American to complete the railroad from the coast 
to Quito. Also he had curtailed some of the unbridled graft of the 
church; and strangely enough the church had resented that species 
of reform and turned the power of the Conservatives against him. 
To be sure, the queer little man had objected to surrendering his office 
to a newly elected incumbent ; but that is a common South American 
peccadillo. When the populace rose and drove him out, he went down 
to the coast and gathered an army of his ieWow-costenos. But luck 
had deserted him. After a few battles he was captured, together with 

144 







A corner of Quito-looking through a garbage-hole into one of the many ravines by which the 

city is broken up 



' ,"' 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

several sons, nephews, and henchmen. The Conservatives were trium- 
phant. The Government ordered the captives to be sent up to Quito. 
The general in command at Guayaquil protested that such action was 
unsafe until the fury of the populace evaporated. The Government 
assured him the danger was visionary, and repeated the order. A 
special train was made up, and set out on the long climb to the plateau. 
That was on a Saturday. Next morning a priest, noted for his virulent 
eloquence, preached a sermon that lashed the church-going masses into 
fury. At noon word came that the train had arrived, and the prisoners 
hurried by automobile to the Panoptico, the wheel-shaped penitentiary 
up on the lower flanks of Pichincha. The populace quickly gathered. 
The bullet-holes through the false stone walls of the dismal little mud 
cells, in the narrow corners of which the prisoners crouched, were still 
fresh when we wandered through the place, months later. Among the 
most fanatical of the mob were the police and those whose duty it was 
to guard the prison. In the excitement some twoscore prisoners 
escaped, and joined the rioters. The little ex-president and his com- 
panions, dead or dying, were stripped naked, ropes were tied to their 
ankles, and they were dragged for hours through the cobbled streets 
of Quito, the frenzied populace raising the echoes of the surrounding 
ranges with shouts of. "Long Live the Church!" "Viva la Virgen 
Maria ! " 

I have two photographs taken by Don Jesus, nephew of my host, 
from the window of what was later my own room, as the bodies of the 
former president and his eldest son were passing. They show a throng 
made up exclusively of cholos, those of mixed blood, who constitute 
the bulk of Quito's population. Not a white collar of the gente decente 
or the broad felt hat of an Indian is to be seen. On through the 
entire length of the city the barbaric procession continued. Near the 
Plaza San Bias a swarm of the lowest women in town descended with 
knives from their hovels and carried off gruesome mementoes of the 
orgy. At length the mob reached the Ejido, the broad, green play- 
ground of Quito, where they hacked in pieces the bodies of the victims 
with machetes and whatever implement came to hand. Some carried 
to their huts as souvenirs the heads of the ex-president and his sons, 
from which they were recovered with difficulty only after the frenzy 
had died down and been slept off. The rest was piled in heaps and 
burned. Such were los arrastres ("the draggings "), to which the 
educated quiteno refers, if at all, in shamed undertones. 

Quito is not so light of complexion as Bogota. Not merely is her 

145 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

percentage of Indian blood higher, but even those of unmixed Euro- 
pean ancestry have a sallow or olive tint, and little of the color in their 
cheeks frequent in the more rigorous capital of Colombia. Negroes 
are unknown as residents. There is a careful gradation in caste, yet 
chiefly a void in place of what, in other lands, would be a middle class. 
The population is divided rather sharply between those brutalized 
from carrying ox-loads on their backs, and those who remain soft and 
effeminate from careful avoidance of any muscular exertion. For 
even the cholo is economically either Indian or white, depending on 
his wealth or occupation. To carry even a small package through 
the streets is to jeopardize one's standing as a member of the upper 
class. " Don't hurry," a frock-tailed quiteho told me in all serious- 
ness one day. " People will think you are ocupado," busy, that is, 
with vulgar work. It is customary to raise one's hat to every male 
acquaintance " of your own class or above," to pause and shake hands 
with every one considered your equal, to ask him how he has 
amanecido ("dawned"), to inquire after his family individually, and 
to shake hands again before parting; and that as often as you meet 
him, though it be every half-hour during the day. Americans who have 
lived long in South America have the hand-shaking habit chronically. 
The greeting, or more exactly the acknowledgment of the greeting, 
of one's inferior varies from a patronizing heartiness to the corner 
tailor to a half-audible grunt to an Indian. The latter is always ad- 
dressed in the " tu " form, " because," as one of my Beau Brummel 
acquaintances put it, " there is no reason whatever to show any re- 
spect to the Indian." During several months' acquaintance I found 
no great reason to show any to the speaker; but that, perhaps, is be- 
side the point. 

How wholly lacking the place is in genuine democracy is frequently 
illustrated. I was strolling in the plaza mayor one day, for instance, 
with the grandson of the " Washington of Ecuador," a youth of Amer- 
ican school training and of unusually high standards, when he stepped 
on the flagging surrounding the central monument. The cholo 
policeman on guard hesitated, but finally screwed up unusual courage 
and informed the youth in a courteous, not to say humble, manner 
that he had been ordered not to let any one walk on the flagging. The 
descendant of Ecuador's founder turned a brilliant red, as if his noble 
house had been vilely insulted, then so white that his blond hair seemed 
to become dark brown. He strode across to the officer, who was con- 
siderably larger than he, caught him by the coat, and all but jerked 

146 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

him off his feet. The policeman abjectly apologized. The "best 
people " of Quito do not realize that it is not the individual police- 
man, their " inferior," giving them orders, but lawful and orderly so- 
ciety speaking through him. 

As in the days of Stevenson's travels, a century ago, " the principal 
occupation of persons of rank is visiting their estates, particularly at 
harvest-time." By far the greater portion of the year they spend in 
town, however, leaving their haciendas in charge of mayordomos little 
acquainted with modern agricultural methods. The city has so few 
recreative attractions that it is hard for a man of education to avoid a 
more or less studious life, be it only as a pastime. Yet Quito does not 
even aspire to rival Bogota as the " Athens of South America." 
Ecuador is not without her literature, but it has come from other towns 
more frequently than from the capital. The game of politics, not with- 
out its perils, engrosses the attention of many. Then, as in most Latin- 
American countries, not a few dissipate their energies in the " pursuit 
of pleasure " of a rather specific kind. So assiduously does the average 
quiteno devote himself to this from early, youth that it is not strange 
that an old man of the decente class is rarely seen. There is a con- 
siderable provincialism, even among the best educated classes. I heard 
often such questions as "What is a sleigh?" "When is summer?" 
The story is well vouched for that a congressman asked a colleague 
just back from abroad, " Can a man get to Europe in three weeks on a 
good mule ? " 

The women of the well-dressed class in Quito are less given to the 
display of mustaches than those of Bogota. Not a few are distinctly 
attractive, particularly in early youth. In later life too many suggest 
in their features some years of a rather harrowing existence. Out- 
spoken quitefios lay this condition at the door of the priests and friars, 
but mere economic pressure probably plays at least as considerable a 
part. The up-keep of so many enormous ecclesiastical institutions 
cannot but drain the resources of so stagnant a city. Wealth does not 
abound, and feminine opportunity to earn a livelihood is narrowly re- 
stricted. It is not strange, then, if more than one family still rated in 
the gentle decente class remains with no other barrier against starva- 
tion than the youthful freshness of its daughters. In most parts of the 
world a glance suffices to distinguish a woman of public life from her 
respected sisters. In Quito it is not so easy. Indeed, there seems to be 
no hard and fast line between the two classes. Certain undercurrents 
suggest a tacit admission that some families have only one means of 

147 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

tiding over their existence until a lucky turn of politics, or of the lottery 
wheel, sets them on their feet again. Then, if the girl's career has not 
been too public, she may be bestowed on a husband of a somewhat 
lower social level. 

Let me not leave the impression of a general laxity among the women 
of Quito. The sheltered daughters of the most responsible classes are 
models of modesty and domesticity. But he who dwells any length of 
time in the city would be blind to overlook certain facts, be they the 
result of an impoverished society or more directly fostered by those 
ecclesiastical elements to whom the embittered men of higher rank 
charge them. 

Thus far I have said little of the, if not most numerous, at least 
most conspicuous class in Quito, — the Indians. Ignoring the very 
considerable number in whose veins runs a greater or less percentage 
of aboriginal blood, those in whom it is still without admixture make 
up perhaps forty per cent, of the population, and give the city most of 
its color. There is not a house in town, from the bright-yellow, three- 
story adobe dwelling of the president down, without its Indians, — 
family servants and burden-bearers huddled in the mud cells about the 
cobbled patio of the lower story, or homeless wretches who lie by night 
in any unoccupied corner and pick up a precarious existence by day in 
competition with donkeys and pack-animals. Their earth-floored ken- 
nels form the tassel-ends of almost every street ; they scatter out along 
all the highways, and dot the flanks of every range and mountain spur 
in the vicinity. 

If they have changed since the Conquest, it is for the worse. In 
habits and condition they vary scarcely at all from those of the dreary 
Andean villages through which we had passed. Theirs is a purely 
animal existence. They have not the faintest notion of any line be- 
tween filth and cleanliness, avoiding only that which is obviously poison, 
by an instinct common to the lower animals. I have seen them drink 
water I am sure a thirsty horse would not touch, and that despite the 
fact that fresh water was to be had a few yards away. They literally 
never wash so much as a finger, except on some such occasion as a 
church fiesta, when they may pause at a pool or mud-hole on the edge 
of town to scrub their feet with a stone. They speak a debauched 
dialect of Quichua, the tongue of the Incas, mixed with some words of 
the conquered Caras, though all understand Spanish, or at least the 
Indian-Spanish spoken in Quito. 

Many consider the Andean Indian a debased Mongolian type, a 

148 




After the bullfight a yearling is often turned into the ring for the amusement of the youthful 
male population of Quito 




A group of the Indians that form so large a percentage of Quito's population. The hats i 
light gray, the ponchos, skirts, and shawls each some crude, brilliant color 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

theory not without its basis in his features. In a curious old book of 
the National Library of Ecuador — the " History of the Kingdom of 
Quito," written in 1789, the Jesuit Padre Velasco takes up the ques- 
tion of the origin of the Indian and settles it — at least to his own satis- 
faction. To begin with, the Church has declared the inhabitants of the 
New World " rational," that is, descended from Adam and Eve. That 
point being disposed of, it follows that " the men and animals who 
were found in America must be descendants of those who emerged 
from Noah's ark; for does not the Bible say that all the world was 
covered with water? Even granted, for the sake of argument," con- 
tinues the razor-minded padre, " that the mountains of South America 
protruded a bit above the surface of those waters, is it conceivable that 
man could live for months on the highest peaks, eating snow, drinking 
snow, and sleeping in snow ? Could he even have stood up for nearly 
a year on those pyramids of snow and ice ? " I give it up. Ask some 
polar explorer. What then remains of the argument of those who still 
cling to the authoctonomous heresy? Obviously there is no other re- 
course then to admit that the ancestors of the race found their way to 
America by the Behring Strait, or across the Pacific from the shores 
of Asia. 

Whatever his origin, the Indian of the Andes is a distinct reality, 
distinct, indeed, to all the five senses, and he varies little throughout the 
length of the continent. In build he is stocky and short, very muscular, 
with the strength of a mule for carrying loads on his back, inde- 
fatigable on foot, but weak for other labor. His color is between a 
tarnished copper and a more or less intense bronze. His head is large ; 
his neck thick and long, his eyes small, black, and penetrating, yet at 
times strangely suggesting those of a dead fish ; his nose is bulky, and 
somewhat flattened and spread; his teeth are white, even, and always 
in splendid condition ; his long hair, worn sometimes flying loose, some- 
times in a single braid wound with red tape, is jet-black, without luster, 
abundant, perfectly straight, strong and coarse as that of a horse's 
mane, without even a tendency to baldness. His lips are thick and 
heavy, the lower one somewhat hanging, giving him a suggestion of 
sulkiness. His forehead is low, his mouth large, and his prominent 
cheek-bones and large ears give his face an appearance of great width. 
He is broad-shouldered, with a chest like a barrel, but slender of leg 
and small of foot. He grows no beard, and has almost no hair on the 
body. 

Men and women alike, except a rare male with a sole of home-tanned 

149 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

leather secured by thongs, are bare-legged at least halfway to the 
knees, their feet, like calloused hoofs, marked by stony trails and years 
of barnyard wallowing. The male wears a broad, round, light-gray 
hat of thick felt, a kind of pajama shirt or blouse of fancily colored 
calico, or lienzo, a very roomy pair of " panties " of thinnest white cot- 
ton that reach anywhere from his knees to halfway to his undomesti- 
cated feet. Besides these garments, he is never seen without his 
ruana, or poncho, which serves him as a cloak and carry-all by day, and 
as a bed and covering by night. This is always of some startling, crude 
color, deep red predominating, with such screaming combinations as 
magenta and purple, carmine and yellow, though when sufficiently soiled 
and sun-bleached, the old rose and velvety brown, the brick red or 
turquoise blue, take on all the soft richness of Oriental rugs. It is this 
commonly homespun garment, and the corresponding one of the 
women, that make Quito such a color-splashed city. 

The woman, too, copies the dress of her ancestors to remote genera- 
tions. She wears the same hat as the male — hat-pins are unknown to 
her, all down the Andes — a beltless waist of coarse cloth, either open, 
or thin and ragged; several strips of colored bayeta (a woolish shoddy) 
wrapped tightly around her drafthorse hips from waist to calves in 
guise of skirt., always slit open on one side, showing an inner petticoat 
— once white — though sometimes in striking solid colors, in marked 
contrast to the outer skirt ; and a blanket, smaller, but as audible in hue 
as the poncho of the male, thrown round her shoulders like a shawl. 
She is fond of gaudy earrings of colored glass or similar rubbish, 
ranging in size from large to colossal; from one to a dozen strings of 
cheap red beads, often the bean of a wild plant indigenous to the 
region, hang around her neck; generally brass rings adorn every 
finger; and often many beads are wound round and round her bare 
arms. She is completely devoid of feminine charm. She needs none, 
for she is amply worth her keep as a beast of burden. 

As far as I know, there is no law in Quito requiring an Indian woman 
not to be seen without a babe in arms, or, rather, in shawl ; but if one 
exists, it is seldom violated. In an hour I have seen, by actual count, 
more than three hundred female aborigines pass my window in the calle 
Flores, and not a score of them but bore on her back a child of from 
two weeks to two years of age, to say nothing of several other bundles 
and her whirling spindle. When the infant is tiny, it is carried length- 
wise at the bottom of the blanket-shawl knotted across the mother's 
chest. When it is older, it is tossed or climbs astride her broad back. 

150 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

lying face down, with legs spread, while she throws her outer garment 
about it, ties the knot on her chest — or on her forehead if the child is 
heavy — and trots along at her work the day through, without the least 
apparent notice of the offspring. The babe falls asleep, or gazes with 
curious, yet rather dull, eyes at the world as it speeds by, peering over 
the mother's shoulder like an engineer from his cab, eats such food or 
refuse as falls into its hands, or plays with the mother's tape- wound 
braid. The Indian woman never carries her offspring in any other 
manner unless, in her role as a common carrier, she picks up a load too 
bulky or heavy to place the infant atop, such as a bedstead, a bureau, 
or two full-sized sacks of wheat — these are not exaggerations, but 
frequent cargoes — when she hangs the child in front, in the concave 
of her figure, like a baby kangaroo in the maternal pouch, knotting the 
supporting garment across her shoulders. 

The youngest baby is already inconceivably dirty, yet almost al- 
ways robustly healthly in appearance, though the infant mortality 
of the class is appalling. It is an unusual experience to hear an 
Indian baby cry. From its earliest years it seems to adopt that uncom- 
plaining attitude toward life that is so marked a characteristic of the 
adults. Though she treats her offspring with no active unkindness — 
in all the years I spent in South America I have never seen an Indian 
mother strike a child — the aboriginal woman seems to endure it 
passively, like any other burden thrust upon her from which there 
is no escape, carrying it where it will be least troublesome, and never, at 
least openly, showing any caressing fondness for it. The child old 
enough to toddle about the streets often remains on the mother's back, 
as if to hold the place for the next comer. It is a common experience 
to hear an Indian child ask in a perfectly fluent tongue for a serving 
at the maternal source of supply. 

There is scant difference in appearance between the two sexes, and 
none whatever in their labor, except that, if there is only one load, the 
woman carries it, and the baby in addition. In both the half-breed 
and Indian classes the women are more uncleanly than the men. 
Like the latter, they work at all the coarser unskilled tasks, shoveling 
earth, mixing and carrying mortar, cobbling streets ; while in the mat- 
ters of loads there is nothing under two hundred pounds in weight 
which, once on their backs, they cannot jog along under at a kind of 
limping gait that seems tireless. Almost any day the furniture and 
entire possessions of some moving household is displayed to public 
gaze as it jogs through town on the backs of an Indian family. 

151 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

The chief water-supply of Quito is a constant string of Indians from 
the fountain opposite the government palace, with huge, red earthen 
jars sitting on their hips and supported by a thong across the fore- 
head. It is a commonplace to meet an Indian carrying the gaudy 
image of some saint larger than himself. Cheap coffins of half- 
rotten boards, painted sky-blue or pink and decorated with strips 
of gilded paper, frequently mince past, secured by the brilliant poncho 
of the carrier, knotted across Tiis chest. I had occasion one day to 
transport a type-writer a few blocks. The Indian prepared to sling 
it on his back with a rope. When I objected to this method, I found 
that the fellow not only could not carry it in his hands, but that 
he could not lift it to his head. When I placed it there, however, 
he ambled away as if he had nothing on his mind but his hat. 

Frequently an entire family takes a large job, such as carrying a 
building from one end of town to another, adobe brick by brick. Such 
a one passed my window for weeks. All day long they dog-trotted 
back and forth in single file along the line of smooth-worn flagstones 
in the middle of the street, their bare feet making absolutely no sound, 
never a word or a sign of complaint finding outward expression. The 
man and woman each bore the same number of mud bricks piled on 
their backs, and the latter always carried the baby in her pouch, though 
they made a hundred trips a day. Why the infant could not have been 
left at one end or the other of the journey it was hard to guess. Two 
children, one a little fellow of five with one brick on his back, his 
brother of seven or eight with two, toiled all day long between father 
and mother, as if they were being systematically trained for the only 
life before them. 

The Andean Indian is even less like the tall and haughty redskin of 
our country in manner than in appearance. Compared with him, the 
Mexican Indian is self-assertive, bold, and ferocious. Silent and ab- 
stracted, he takes no apparent heed of what goes on about him. Of 
phlegmatic temperament, a truly wooden equanimity of temper, melan- 
choly, taciturn, and reserved, he is noted above all for a distrust that is 
perhaps natural, but is more likely the result of centuries of privations 
since the coming of the Spaniards. He has a blind submission to au- 
thority, great attachment to the house in which he lives, and is so 
cowardly that he lets himself be dominated by the most despicable 
members of other races. A complete outsider in government and 
public affairs, he is treated by the rest of the population like a domestic 
animal. The merchant of Quito who requires a carrier to deliver 

152 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

some bundle does not wait for one to. offer himself. He steps into the 
street and snatches the first Indian who passes, though he be on his way 
to a dying parent, or preparing his child's funeral ; and the Indian per- 
forms the task as uncomplainingly as some mechanical device, and re- 
turns to wait perhaps an hour or two for the few cents the merchant 
chooses to give him. Only when he is drunk does the aboriginal's man- 
ner change. Then he is garrulous and mildly disorderly. But even on 
a Saturday afternoon, when the highways are lined with Indians of both 
sexes reeling homeward, the gringo passes unnoticed, in marked con- 
trast with the gantlet of insolence, if not, indeed, of actual danger, 
which he must run under like circumstances in the highlands of 
Mexico. 

The newcomer's sympathy for the Indian of Quito gradually evapo- 
rates with the discovery that he is utterly devoid of ambition, as com- 
pletely indifferent to his own betterment as any four-footed animal. 
Pad out this fact with all its details and ramifications, discarding en- 
tirely the American's ingrown tendency to imbue every human being 
with a striving character, and the hopelessness of the Indian's condi- 
tion will be more clearly realized. The Government of Ecuador gives 
scant attention to the education of the aboriginals ; even if it provided 
schools and forced attendance, there would still remain the problem of 
arousing in these people any interest in, or effort for, self-improve- 
ment. 

A simple episode will go far toward visualizing the temperament of 
the Indian of Quito, and perhaps make a bit clearer the ease with which 
Pizarro and his handful of tramps overthrew the Empire of the Incas. 
I had gone out for a stroll one afternoon along the road to Gualla- 
bamba. Some three miles from town a light rain turned me back. 
There were no houses near, but numbers of Indians were going and 
coming. A short distance ahead was a group engaged in noisy con- 
tention. Suddenly a handsome, muscular young Indian broke away 
and ran toward me, his long, black hair streaming out behind him. At 
his heels, cursing, came three cholos, in the dark hats, more sober 
blankets and trousers of their caste, with shorn hair and straggling 
suggestions of mustaches. I was not armed — one does not trouble 
to carry weapons about Quito — and in my bespattered road garb I 
had certainly no appearance of protective authority. When he 
reached me, however, the frightened Indian, instead of running on, 
turned as sharply as about a corner, and pattered along close at my 
heels, breathing quickly. I continued my stroll, while the drunken 

153 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

half-breeds, far more muscular than I, hovered about ten steps in 
the rear, crying: 

" Ah, coward ! You run to the sefior for protection ! " 

Yet not a step nearer did they approach during the furlong or more 
that the procession lasted. Then, as we passed the entrance to an 
hacienda, the Indian suddenly sprinted away up its avenue of euca- 
lyptus-trees faster than the cholos could follow. When they overtook 
me again, one protested in plaintive tones : 

" Ah, sefior, ese sinverguenza de Indio did not deserve your pro- 
tection." 

Then they fell behind, while I, who had been an entirely passive 
actor in all the scene, strolled on into the city. It would be hard to 
imagine a similar incident in Mexico. 

This Indian's older daughter knocked at my door one day to say 
that, as it was " Don Panchito's " birthday, the celebration in the sala 
next my own room would probably keep me awake all night anyway, 
and had I not better join the party. By eight the beating of the 
piano had begun. When I appeared, " Don Panchito " took me on 
a tour of the guests, seated in solemn quadrangle around the four 
walls of the room, the sexes segregated. The South American has a 
custom which might well be imported into our own land, to the relief 
of frequent embarrassment. As he was introduced, each man rose, 
bowed profoundly, and announced his own name in clear-cut tones, — 
" Enrique Burgos de Perez y Silva, servidor de usted." The women 
remained seated, but made their names similarly known. A profes- 
sional pianist, a patched, dishevelled, and hungry-looking young man of 
some Indian blood, had already begun a very nearly continuous per- 
formance at fast time, with barely two-minute intervals between the 
half-hour dances. In a corner sat motionless all the evening two pro- 
fessional chaperons — for " Don Panchito " was a widow — sour- 
faced, sleepy-looking old women of none too immaculate habits, 
wrapped in black mantos from which only nose and eyes protruded. 

There were no dance cards. Each pair started in or stopped when 
they saw fit, quite irrespective of the others. A man stepped across 
the room, held out his gloved right hand to a girl, without a word, and 
she rose to accept an invitation that apparently could not be refused — 
at least, not one failed to accept it, though some of the more attractive 
were led out upon the floor at least fifty times in the course of the even- 
ing. Evidently it was " bad form " to carry on a conversation out of 
hearing of the chaperon. Neither dancer visibly spoke a word until 

J 54 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

the girl wished to stop, when she murmured " gracias " and was at 
once returned in silence to her seat. As the evening wore on, several 
young fops dropped in, alleging conflicting engagements as an excuse 
for their tardiness, and joined the celebration without removing their 
lavender gloves, which, indeed, the chilliness of the room pardoned. 
One of the newcomers, in particular, stirred up the ladies to almost 
human expressions of interest. He was son of the Minister of the 
Interior, just back from Paris, and lost no opportunity to display the 
wisdom he had gleaned in the " Capital of the World," — a rather sharp- 
cornered French and an authoritative knowledge of new and more com- 
plicated manners of hopping about the floor to music. At frequent in- 
tervals our eight-year-old Indian slavey, Mercedes, familiarly known as 
" Meech," arrived with fiery drinks in which we toasted " Don Pan- 
chito," even the young girls tossing it off without a tear. At mid- 
night the festival raged at its height. At one o'clock we sat down to 
dinner in a temperature far from agreeable to those of us who did not 
dance. Then the celebration broke out anew, though the chaperons 
and pianist, and even " Don Panchito," had disappeared. The young 
fops removed their gloves and took turns on the stool. The clock was 
striking four when I retired, and little " Meech " was still serving 
liquid gladness as uncomplainingly and expressionlessly as ever. 
When I awoke at eight, she had just finished tidying up the sala, 
and was beginning her regular daily labors. 

Gradually we made the acquaintance of various celebrities. There 
was " Chispa," for instance, the little Spanish bull-fighter who gave a 
benefit and " last final performance " in the plaza de toros each Sun- 
day. The royal sport of Spain is, at best, a gloomy pastime in Span- 
ish-America. Even when skilled toreadors from across the Atlantic 
are to be had, the bulls raised in the Andean highlands are so manso 
that the game degenerates into little more than public butchery. The 
killing of horses is forbidden in the bull-ring of Quito, both by law 
and because of the high price of those rare animals, and the toreador 
is not permitted to stir up a sluggish bull by exploding banderillos de 
fuego on his flanks. " Chispa," however, who was just such a 
" spark " as his apodo suggested, would have enlivened the most dreary 
entertainment, though his companions were local amateurs, so clumsy 
that he was called upon to save the life of each a dozen times during 
each corrida. Each succeeding " despedida " had some new feature to 
draw recreation-hungry Quito within the circular mud walls. One 
Sunday the program announced the engagement of " Hombres de 

155 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

Yerba " and " Hombres Gordos " (" Men of Hay " and " Fat Men "), 
and the inventive Spaniard was all but forced to lock the gates against 
the tailend of the throng. One of his amateurs was bound round and 
round with green alfalfa and set in the center of the ring. The bull, 
however, either was not hungry or in no mood for jests, and tossed 
the helpless fellow scornfully from his path. The " Hombres Gor- 
dos " were made up with clown faces topped by silk hats, their bodies 
padded to enormous size with excelsior. Still the protection was 
not sufficient. One was thrown so savagely that the audience agreed 
he had been killed — until the evening paper announced he had merely 
broken a leg and several ribs. The fat man is no more beloved in 
Quito than elsewhere, and the merriment went on unabated. It is 
quiteiio custom for the matador to brindar (dedicate the death of 
each bull) to some celebrity or person of means in the audience, 
tossing the favored one his cap to hold during the killing, and ex- 
pecting it to be thrown back with a roll of bills in proportion to the 
skill of the coup de grace. Toward the end of the " last final per- 
formances " the supply of local " personages " grew so low that the 
eye of " Chispa," roving around the circle, fell upon Hays ; but even 
as he opened his mouth for the speech of dedication, the ex-corporal 
faded from public view. 

Then there was Umberto Peyrounel, our first really and truly, flesh 
and blood " andarin." Derived from the Spanish word andar (to 
walk), the term is used in the Andes to designate a foreigner who 
travels on foot, without any particular excuse for traveling at all; a 
peculiarly Latin type of tramp, loving to attract attention and making 
his living by so doing. We ourselves had often been styled " andar- 
ines " on the journey from Bogota, though this genuine article scorn- 
fully rated us " excursionistas." The distinction seems to be, not 
whether a man " andars " on foot, but whether he makes his way with- 
out using his own money, if such he possesses. 

We saw Umberto first at a Sunday night concert, where he was in- 
conspicuously amusing himself by running races with several hundred 
newsboys and bootblacks around the plaza mayor. A stocky fellow, 
tall as Hays, of middle age, he was modestly dressed in a suit of sky- 
blue corduroy, leather leggings, and a velvet cap of the Dutch fisher- 
man or Quartier Latin style. Across his chest hung a row of large 
medals ; a flaring, wax-ended mustache all but touched his ears, and 
his luxurious black hair hung loose almost to his waist. When he 
called on us next morning his coiffure was done up in a simple maidenly 

156 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

knot at the back of his head. On closer examination the gleaming 
brass medals seemed to be glorified tobacco tags. He announced him- 
self the son of Italian parents, born in the Argentine, of a sect corre- 
sponding to the Huguenots of France, known as the " martyrs of Pied- 
mont." Leaving home three years before, he had walked across his 
native land to Chile, thence to Quito, where he was preparing to push 
on to Bogota. To the people along the way — and even to us, until he 
caught the gleam in our eyes — he announced that two great dailies of 
Buenos Aires and New York had offered him a prize of $100,000 to 
make the journey on foot from the door of one to that of the other. 
On the road he was accompanied by a dog, wore silver-plated spurs 
as a sign of his rank as a caballero, and carried, in addition to a re- 
volver and rifle, some forty pounds of baggage, most of which con- 
sisted of bulky ledgers filled with handwritten statements of his 
arrival and departure on foot, signed by every corregidor, alcalde, or 
native official of whatever species, by merchants, lawyers, and editors 
of every place, large or small, he had visited, each adorned with its of- 
ficial seal. This collecting of signatures was no mere whim ; it was the 
customary excuse of his fellows for surreptitiously appealing to charity. 
At every hamlet he opened the ledgers — ostensibly to give the resi- 
dents the pleasure* of adding their names to the roll of honor — and at 
the psychological moment slipped into their hands a printed card bear- 
ing a subtle plea for assistance in winning his great " prize." All 
genuine " andarines," Umberto assured us, did the same, and he berated 
us soundly for not having adopted the custom. 

, " How can you prove to the public that you have made the journey 
on foot, if you do not have the testimonials of distinguished persons 
along the way?" he cried, scornfully. 

" The public has its choice of believing it or jumping off the end 
of the dock," Hays answered for both of us. 

In plain English, Peyrounel was a beggar, though he would have 
been shocked beyond words to hear us say so. He called himself a 
" Champion of God," a bitter enemy of the priesthood, and in each 
town of importance gave a lecture on his journey and, later on, " if the 
population showed enough intelligence," a sermon. The religious 
fanatic so often proves, sooner or later, to be in a sexually neurotic 
state that we were not surprised when, several days later, Peyrounel 
burst out, apropos of nothing: 

" Why do girls always become enamored of strange travelers ? No 
sooner do I enter a town than several maidens fall desperately in love 

157 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

with me. I can't be expected to satisfy them all, can I ? One has one's 
work to do." 

" Wooden-headed ass that I am!" growled Hays. " If I 'd only 
thought to grow curls ! " 

" Between you and me, as men of the same profession," went on the 
collector of signatures, " I don't mind telling you that I ride now and 
then by train through a bad piece of country. What 's the use of walk- 
ing hundreds of hot desert miles, when the people will never know the 

difference? For instance; here, under the seal of , it says that I 

walked all the four hundred miles from . Well, I did — on a 

steamer most of the way." 

In short the argentino's mental equipment was somewhat out of re- 
pair. One could not exactly put one's finger on the loose screw, but it 
could frequently be heard rattling. The following Sunday we at- 
tended his first " lecture." On the dismal daytime stage of Quito's 
hitherto lifeless Teatro Sucre sat Peyrounel, utterly alone but for the 
faithful dog at his feet, thrown into silhouette by an uncurtained win- 
dow at the back, his sky-blue uniform looking more absurd than ever, 
his hair hanging in long, wet, careful curls about his broad shoulders. 
Quito has so few entertainments that it will endure almost anything 
particularly if no admission is charged; and some three hnudred men 
were scattered about in the painfully upright seats, when the " an- 
darin " rose. He read first some incomprehensible rodomontade on 
the power of the will, then drew forth a manuscript purporting to 
give an account of his journey, in reality strictly confined to a list 
of the towns he had visited, with the height of each above sea-level. 
The " lecture " was doubly unsuccessful, for when the speaker ended 
with an appeal for funds to continue his statistical journey, the gather- 
ing stampeded so effectively that all but a few had escaped when 
he reached the door, and the reward of his labors was a bare six 
dollars. 

" Next Sunday," he announced, when we met him in the plaza that 
evening, " I am going to give the public of Quito the benefit of my 
conclusions on suicide. Suicide, I shall prove, is always a prompting 
of the devil. Therefore it cannot be the prompting of God. Ergo, 
a man should not commit suicide, because he should never yield to the 
promptings of the devil." 

Truly a Solomon of pure reason had come to Quito. Yet somehow 
the authorities, always backward in such matters, failed to take ad- 

158 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

vantage of this splendid opportunity to give the Teatro Sucre another 
free airing. 

Never since those days in Quito have I heard the oft-repeated word 
" andarin," than the picture of Peyrounel and his curls has not come 
to mind. However, he had undoubtedly covered long distances on 
foot, and we exchanged many a practical hint of roadway information. 
He planned to visit all the important cities of the United States, and 
to reach New York within three years. His letters of introduction 
already included many to American officials ; he carried, for instance, 
one to the mayor of Seattle. Being an experienced traveler, all may 
have gone well with him south of the Rio Grande. But beyond it lay 
dangers he did not suspect; for some unromantic justice of the peace, 
unable to distinguish between an " andarin " and a common " vag," 
between the honorable profession of gathering seals and signatures, 
and mere begging, may have the cruelty to reward him with the no- 
torious " year and a day." 

On October tenth there was an eclipse of the sun, total at the 
Ecuador-Colombia boundary, and visible in all the southern hemi- 
sphere. In the days of the Scyri and Incas such a phenomenon was 
taken as a threat that the end of the world was at hand ; a sign that 
an angry god was abandoning his erring people. On this occasion 
many of the less-educated classes remained in the streets all night, 
for an earthquake had been prophesied. The local observatory had 
assigned a scientist to " note the peculiar actions of the populace and 
the lower animals during the eclipse." It came toward seven in the 
morning. Gradually the brilliant sun disappeared, until only the 
slightest thread, of crescent shape, remained visible; the world grew 
dark as at early dusk on a heavily clouded evening, then slowly lighted 
up again in all its equatorial magnificence. Observers reported that 
a few fowls returned to roost ; the curs slinking about the plaza seemed 
for a time undecided whether to seek their nightly lairs. But the 
actions of the populace were confined to the incessant smoking of 
cigarettes and to making the most of an excuse to put off their day's 
task as long as possible — neither of which was unusual enough to be 
worthy of note. The majority, unsupplied with smoked glasses, found 
this no handicap, for the reflected eclipse in the plaza pool served the 
same purpose. World scientists had been sent to many of the larger 
South American cities with elaborate photographic equipment, only to 
find their long journeys wasted because of clouds. They would have 

159 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

done better to have come to Quito, where two unscientific vagabonds 
caught excellent pictures of the phenomenon in mere kodak snap- 
shots. 

It was on the morning of November eighteenth, five months from 
the day we had sailed together from the Canal Zone, that Hays and 
I set out along the muddy, cobbled highway to the railway station, 
carrying in turn a bundle of the size of a suitcase. By 7 130 the 
former corporal of police had taken his wooden seat in the dingy little 
second-class car, and had stowed his belongings under it well out of 
sight of the collector ; for extravagant as are its fares, the Guayaquil- 
Quito Railway allows a second-class passenger only fifteen pounds of 
baggage. At eight the tri-weekly train let pass unnoticed its scheduled 
hour of departure. Several stocky Americans of the type easily recog- 
nized as " railroad men," and as many English-speaking negroes could 
be seen shouldering their way in and out of the motley throng. The 
engineers were leathery-skinned Americans ; the conductors fat, burly 
Americans ; the collectors gaunt, stringy, dense-looking young English-^ 
men, and the brakemen West Indian negroes who spoke a more fluent 
Spanish that their superiors, and were better " mixers " among the 
native passengers. After a time they decided to repair the last coach, 
and lay for some time under it, tinkering at a brakeshoe. Rumor had 
it that this was only a ruse; that the engineer assigned to the run 
had been arrested the evening before, and that the train could not 
leave until his trial was over. 

Whatever the cause for delay, it ended at last, and with a great 
snorting and straining and blowing of steam the little old " Baldwin " 
began to drag its four wagones out of the station compound. First 
came a box-car, crowded inside and on top with gente del pueblo; 
then, behind the baggage and mail car, the densely-packed second- 
class; and finally the coach-de-luxe with a dozen passengers, most of 
whom would hasten to take their lawful place in the car ahead as soon 
as they could escape the eyes of their fellow-townsmen thronging, the 
station platform. The Indian of Ecuador still commonly walks, a 
fact easily explained by a glance at the exorbitant rate-sheet. It was 
only by dint of much struggle that the railroad, reaching Quito four 
years before, had finally settled the point that even "prominent per- 
sons " shall pay fare ; now it has taken the offensive, and collects cart- 
age even on the bundles and fruit the passengers are accustomed to 
stack in the car about them. The engine panted asthmatically to sur- 
mount a two-foot rise, scores of Indians and cholos running alongside, 

160 




Almost everything that moves in Quito rides on the backs of Indians 




An Indian family driving away dull care — and watching me take the picture of a dog down 

the street 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

screaming farewells to their outward-bound friends, some visibly 
weeping for the quiteno of the masses considers death itself little less 
dreadful than departure. Then at length the train swung round the 
sandbank cutting and, catching a down-grade, was off in earnest, and 
reluctantly I saw " Senor Lay-O-Ice " disappear from my South 
American adventures. 

The attack of roaditis had seized him the day before. With no task 
to hold him in Quito, he had been for a time content to spend his 
days at his favorite occupation of sitting on a plaza bench. He had 
even paid his rent well in advance, that he might have an anchor 
to windward. But it had proved a rope of sand when the road lure 
came upon him, and he had feverishly tossed together his indispensable 
junk and turned his face toward other climes. From Guayaquil, 
" unless Yellow Jack or Bubonic beat him to it," he planned to push 
on to Cajamarca and Lima, chiefly by sea, then to strike overland to 
Cuzco. Beyond South America lay various nebulous projects, — a 
year around the Mediterranean, a journey through Spain, or perhaps 
a return to the Zone to earn another " stake " with which to journey 
to the Far East, there to adopt the yellow robe and settle down to the 
tranquil life of studious inactivity he loved so well. 

Thus life moved on, even in Quito. " Chispa " of the bullring had 
taken the same train, feigning a first-class wealth until out of sight of 
his quiteno admirers. Peyrounel, the " andarin," too, was gone, dog, 
gun, hair, medals, spurs and ledgers, to carry back to Bogota the map 
that had piloted us southward. Only one lone gringo descended to the 
city in the folds of Pichinoha, to renew the task that still forbade him 
to listen to the siren that beckoned him on over the encircling horizon. 

To pass over in silence its uncleanliness would be to give a false 
picture of Quito. Only its altitude saves the city from sudden death. 
Its personal habits are indescribable; I do not use the adjective to 
avoid the labor of finding one less trite, but because no other could be 
more exact. If I described in detail one fourth its daily insults to the 
senses, no reputable publisher would print, and no self-respecting 
reader would read it. The city is surrounded by an iron ring of 
smells which the susceptible stranger, accustomed to the moderate de- 
cencies of life, can pass only in haste and trepidation. The condition 
of the best kitchen in Quito would arouse a vigorous protest from an 
American " hobo." However foppish a quiteno family may be out- 
wardly, anybody is considered fitted to the task of washing its dishes 
or waiting on its tables. Among all the tramps of the United States 

161 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

I have never seen one so filthy as the human creatures that hang around 
hotel dining-rooms, or, in the one or two higher-priced establishments, 
are at least to be found just behind the scenes, kicking about the earth 
floor the rolls which the waiter a moment later religiously lays before 
the guest with silver-plated pincers. Yet clients in frock-coats and 
outwardly immaculate garb are never known to raise a voice in 
protest. There is exactly one way to escape these conditions in 
Ecuador, and that is to keep out of the country. A modern Crcesus 
would be forced to endure the same, for though he brought his own 
servants and even his food-supplies with him, the Eucadorian would 
find some means of reducing him to an equality of condition, if only 
by opening the supplies in customs and running his unwashed hands 
through them. 

Among our table companions were lawyers, university professors, 
newspaper editors, commonly with several rings on their fingers; yet 
rare was the man whose finger-nails were not in deepest mourning, 
or whose manners were not befitting a trough. On the street the pass- 
ing of the women was usually marked by an all but overwhelming 
scent of the cheap and pungent perfumes to which all the " decente " 
class, male or female, is addicted, and though their faces were daubed 
a rosy alabaster, it was rare to see one with clean hands, or without a 
distinct dead-line showing at the neck. The city is gashed by several 
deep gullies with trickling streams at their bottoms, which serve as 
general dumping-grounds. Not even the carrion-crow mounts to these 
heights, and the city is denied the doubtful services of this tropical 
scavenger. Though the world .hears little of it, the death-rate from 
typhoid alone in the capital rivals that of " Yellow Jacket " in Guaya- 
quil ; and no precautions whatever are taken against it. When he has 
noted these customs and worse, the visitor will be startled into shrieks 
of sardonic laughter when he runs across a large two-story building 
bearing an elaborately painted shield announcing it the " Oficina de 
Sanidad." 

Yet the quiteiio is extremely jealous of any offer of other races to 
do for him that which he gives no evidence of being able to do for 
himself. Once out of Colombia, we had hoped for relief from the per- 
petual growling at Americans, chiefly in fiery and ill-reasoned news- 
paper editorials. Barely had we crossed the frontier, however, than 
we found Ecuador raging with a new grievance. The Government 
had recently invited the doctor in charge of the sanitation of Panama 
to inspect Guayaquil and bring his recommendations to the capital. 

162 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

A strict censorship on cable messages keeps the outside world largely 
in ignorance of the real conditions in the " Pearl of the Pacific." 
Inside the country, however, the real state of affairs is more nearly 
common knowledge. One could pick almost at random from the local 
newspapers such items as : 

Guayaquil, 22d. Yesterday forty cases of bubonic plague broke out 
in Public School No. 5. There are seven survivors. 

The resident, too, soon learns the real motives that hamper the 
sanitation of that pest-hole. Once it is " cleaned up," argue its short- 
sighted merchants, foreign competitors will flock in upon them. As to 
themselves, they are, with rare exceptions, immune to the two plagues 
for which the port is famous, having recovered from them at some 
earlier period of life. Those who have not recovered have no voice 
in the matter. There are even foreign residents who bend their 
energies to upholding this barrier to competition. 

These interests now, abetted by unseen European elements foster- 
ing the discontent, and the eagerness of the opposing party to make 
political capital out of any cloth, whole or otherwise, had stirred the 
noisy little native papers into a furor, genuine or financed, against the 
Government. The people, in their turn, had worked themselves into the 
conviction that the invitation was only an opening wedge of the " Colos- 
sus of the North " to gain a hand in the rule of the country, which it 
is always the part of the opposition papers to paint as imminent. We 
had not been long in Quito when the attitude of the populace grew so 
serious that a joint meeting of both houses of congress was called to 
explain the government view of the transaction. The diplomatic corps 
was present in force, and as much of the public as could find standing- 
room after the two houses had been seated in the largest chamber avail- 
able in the government palace. The diminutive old Minister of For- 
eign Affairs, who had lived abroad long enough to acquire a point of 
yiew, explained the exact truth of the situation as clearly as a disin- 
terested foreigner might have done. But neither congress nor the 
populace would hear his reasoning. The latter hooted him vocifer- 
ously, calling him " Yanqui ! " and accusing him of being in the pay 
of the United States. The congressmen rose one after another to 
charge him with fostering a conspiracy to surrender Ecuador to the 
Yankees, with many references to the " beegee steekee," and the 
meeting ended with the roar of a bull-necked senator: 

163 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

" Undoubtedly, Senor, we want Guayaquil sanitated ; but we want it 
sanitated by Latin Americans." 

The pesuna and other evidences of sanitary notions of the crowd 
that hemmed us in gave the speech a ludicrousness that none but an 
enraged partizan could have missed. But that night the little Minister 
of Foreign Affairs resigned, and when morning broke he had disap- 
peared. 

For all the handicap of the complete absence of factories and street- 
cars, Quito might easily lay claim to the world's championship in noise. 
The din from its church-towers alone would bring it one of the first 
prizes. It is pleasant to sit out on a sunny hillside listening to the 
music of ringing church-bells as it is borne by on the Sunday morning 
breeze ; but in Quito they are neither bells nor are they rung. In tone 
they suggest suspended masses of scrap-iron, and there is not a bell- 
rope, as we understand the word, in the length and breadth of the 
Andes. Barely has midnight passed, when Indians, hired for the 
nefarious purpose, and mobs of street urchins eager for the oppor- 
tunity, climb into the church-towers and, catching the enormous 
clappers by a rope-end, beat and pound as if each was vying with the 
others in an attempt to reproduce the primeval chaos of sound, ceasing 
only when they drop from exhaustion. No corner of the city is free 
from the metallic uproar. Santa Catalina tower was a bare hundred 
yards above my pillow, and I know scarcely a bl'ock of the town 
over which does not rise at least one such source of torture, hung 
with at least half a dozen bells — to use the word loosely — of 
varying sizes and degrees of discordance. Once awakened, the city is 
never permitted to fall asleep again. By the time it has begun to doze 
off once more, the ringers have recovered, and, taking up their joyful 
task with renewed vigor, repeat the performance at five-minute in- 
tervals until sunrise, and often far into the day. 

This has disturbances of its own. The game-cocks, which no self- 
respecting cholo would be without, challenge one another shrilly from 
their respective patios ; that moment is rare when a child is not 
squalling at the top of its voice, the mother, after the passive way of 
quitenos, making no effort to silence it; cholos whistle all day long 
at their labors or pastimes ; men and boys habitually call one another 
by ear-splitting finger-whistles ; ox-carts, mule-trains, or laden donkeys 
refuse to move unless several arrieros trot behind them incessantly 
screaming and whistling; droves of cattle are led through the streets 
by an Indian blowing a bocina, a horn-like, six-foot length of bamboo ; 

164 




The street by which one leaves Quito on the tramp to the south. In the background the 
church and monastery of Santo Domingo 




Long before Edison thought of his poured-cement houses, the Indians of the Andes were 

building their fences in a similar manner. In the regions where rain is frequent 

they are roofed with tiles or thatch; on the desert coast further south the 

tops afford a place of promenade sometimes miles in length 



THE CITY OF THE EQUATOR 

unoccupied youths like nothing better than to kick an empty tin can 
up or down the cobbled street ; every schoolboy on his way home or to 
school twice a day takes a big copper coin, or in lieu thereof an iron 
washer, and throws it at every cobblestone of his route in a local game 
of " hit it " ; the barking of dogs never ends ; every Indian who loses 
a distant relative, or who can concoct some other fancied cause for 
grief, sits on the sidewalk just out of reach of the contents of one's 
slop-bucket, rocking back and forth, and burdening the air with a 
mournful wail that rises and falls in cadenced volume; for unbroken 
hours iron-tired coaches clatter over the uneven cobbles ; every native 
on horseback must show off to his admiring friends and the fair sex in 
general by forcing his animal to canter and capriole up and down the 
line of flagstones in the middle of the narrow street ; three blind news- 
boys, brothers indistinguishable one from another, appear in succession, 
pausing every few yards to bellow in deepest bass a complete summary 
of the day's news, as if they were reading all the headlines of the papers 
they carry for sale ; and to it all the church-bells add their never broken 
clanging. Apparently there is no law against disturbing the peace; 
without the power to silence the church-towers it would be useless, at 
best. 

In those rare moments around midnight when the city threatens to 
fall silent, it is the police themselves that tide it over. An officer's 
whistle screeches at a corner, to be answered down block after block, 
until it all but dies out in the distance; then back it comes, and con- 
tinues unbrokenly until the church-bells drown it out. Not only that, 
but he is a rare policeman who does not while away the night and keep 
up his courage by playing discordant tunes on his whistle whenever it 
is not in official use. 

To add to its discordance, Quito's voices, due perhaps to some cli- 
matic condition, are often distressing, particularly the shrill, raspy ones 
of the women of the masses, who have somewhere picked up the habit 
of shrieking whenever they have anything to say — which is often. 
Unlike Bogota, Quito has a very faulty pronunciation. The sound 
" sh," for instance, is frequent in the Quichua dialect of the region, 
and though not all quitenos speak the aboriginal tongue, the sound has 
crept into their Spanish, and they tack it on at every opportunity — 
" A ver-sh, Nicanor-sh." " Le voy a llamar-sh." As in all South 
America, the town has the unpleasant habit of hissing at any one whose 
attention is desired, and the word " pues " has been cut down to a mere 
" pss " to be hooked on whenever possible : — " Si, pss ! Va venir-sh 

165 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

mafiana, pss." The " 11 " has become a French " j," as in Central 
America and Panama, so that a street is not a calle but a " caje," a key 
is a " jave," and the newcomer will have difficulty in recognizing the 
place mentioned as " Beja-Coja," however familiar he may be with the 
Bella Colla. Many localisms and Quichua words have found place in 
the general speech. A baby is always a "guagua" (wawa), fre- 
quently corrupted with a Spanish diminutive to " guaguita " ; a boy is 
more often a " huambra " than a muchacho ; and the traveler who does 
not know the aboriginal term " huasi-cama " would have difficulty in 
referring to the Indian house-guard and general servant of the lower 
patio. 

But when its noise grows overwhelming and its picturesqueness pales 
to mere uncleanliness, the stout-legged visitor has only to climb over 
the outer crust of Quito in almost any direction to revel in the stillness 
and feast his eyes on vistas of rolling valleys and mountains, fresh 
spring-green to the very snow-line. A path, for instance, zigzags up 
the falda of Pichincha, steeper than any Gothic roof, through the 
scattering of red-tiled Indian huts called Guarico, and climbs until all 
Quito in its Andean pocket sinks to a toy city far beneath. Another 
road mounts doggedly round and round mountain-spurs and headlands 
until it is lost in clouds, and only the immediate world underfoot re- 
mains visible. The air grows almost wintry ; oxen and Indian women, 
and now and then a man of the same downcast race, come hobbling 
down out of the mist above, with bundles of cut brush on their backs. 
Far up, the road swings around on the brink of things, pauses a 
moment as if to gather courage, then pitches headlong down out of 
sight into a light-gray void, as through a curtain shutting off the 
" Oriente," the hot lands and unbroken forests of eastern Ecuador, a 
totally different world, where the Amazon begins to weave its network, 
and " wild " Indians roam untrammeled. 



166 



CHAPTER VII 

DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

ON the morning of February eighth, " Meech " called me at five. 
I had already been some time awake, such was the excitement 
of so unusual an event as going a journey. The morning 
mists had only begun to clothe the flanks of Pichincha when I broke 
the clinch of " Don Panchito's " last abrazo and creaked away down 
the cobbles of Calle Flores and across the Plaza Santo Domingo in the 
hob-nailed mining-boots suited to the long, stony trail and the rainy 
season ahead. The remnant of my letter of credit I had turned into 
gold sovereigns and sewed them in the band of my trousers; on my 
back were my worldly — or at least my South American — posses- 
sions, including the awkward bulk of the developing-tank packed with 
films and chemicals. That day had passed when I dreamed of driving 
an Indian carrier before me, and experience had taught me not to 
risk the assistance of the mails. Thus the world roamer must leave 
behind in turn each dwelling-place, after growing somewhat attached 
to it, for all its faults, to go its way alone again as in the past, glad — 
or merely sorry — when once in a while the cable brings him a 
whisper of it, as from some former half- forgotten existence. 

It was a familiar route for the first few miles. Now and again I 
overtook Indians carrying enormous loads of Una j as, dull-red earthen 
jars and pots of all sizes enclosed in a kind of fish-net, often topped 
by a great roll of esteras, mats made of lake-reeds which serve the 
carriers as beds. Men and women alike raised their hats to me and 
mumbled some obsequious greeting. They were bound for Latacunga 
market, several days distant from their villages; yet even on so long 
a journey, rare was the woman from whose load did not peer the head 
of a baby. Lower down, inhabited haycocks and huts of swamp-grass 
centered in beautiful potato fields, red or purple with blossoms. A 
cherry-tree, here called by the Quichua term capuli, producing a fruit 
larger but not unlike our " choke-cherry," alternated with what looked 
like the Canadian thistle. 

Three hours later, near the eucalyptus grove of the Flores estate 
that marks Quito's southern sky-line, I topped the ridge that marked 
my hitherto furthest south. The long pile of Pichincha, its three 

167 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

peaks now standing sharply forth, still lay close beside me, the rolling 
green lower ridges subsiding into the mountain lap where Quito, like 
a tiny ant's city, still lay visible, the Panecillo that bulks so large from 
the central plaza sunk to an insignificant mole-hill. Beyond, far 
across it, hovered the hazy-blue ranges of the north; Cayambe reso- 
lutely astride the equator, pointed Cotacache, streaked near the top 
with new-fallen snow, piercing the transparent highland sky. For a 
long time thereafter, as often as I topped a land-billow, I kept getting 
little broken glimpses of the town from the ever-rising world, until at 
last, toward noon, as a mighty mountain wave tossed me high on its 
crest, the view' of the city of the equator flashed forth a moment more; 
then Quito and all its surroundings sank away into the irretrievable 
past. 

Before me lay a new world. With the leisurely dignity of its 
builder, Garcia Moreno, the highway descended into a great distance- 
blue hoy a, one of those saucer-shaped valleys that abound all down 
Ecuador's avenue of volcanoes. Occasionally a horseman in shaggy 
goatskin trousers stared curiously at me ; now and then there passed a 
file of donkeys under sheet-iron roofs, — a cargo of corrugated iron, 
the importer of which still prefers this primitive transportation to the 
more hasty railroad with its startling freight charges. Dandelions and 
white clover flecked the ever-green fields ; frogs sang their bass chorus 
in many a brook and pdntano. Here the way followed more or less 
the route of the great military highway of the Incas. There were two 
of these; one of the llanos, or lowlands of the coast, and this more 
famous one along the crest of the cordillera, built during several reigns 
and finished under Huayna Ccapac. 

Near the village of Macachi, twenty-one miles from the capital, I 
turned aside to the hacienda of a quiteno acquaintance. He was a boy 
of eighteen, scion of one of the old " best families " of Ecuador, who 
have kept their Spanish blood free from mixture, to whom had recently 
fallen the ownership and management of an enormous tract of his little 
country. Educated in our own land, he spoke a slow, pedantic Eng- 
lish. Among his equals, he was soft-spoken almost to the point of 
diffidence. But his voice was commanding enough when he gave 
orders to his mayordomo or escribante, or to any of the hundred In- 
dians who lived clustered about the central hacienda house, all of 
whom addressed him as " Su Merced " (Your Grace) and kowtowed 
as often as he looked at them, as their ancestors might have done to the 
imperial Scyri. Before the sun set, we had time to ride across a part 

168 




Typical huts of the p&ramo of Tiopullo. a bleak, bare mountain-top across which the high- 
way to the south hurries on its way to the warmer valleys beyond 




Beyond the -p&ramo of Azuay the trail clambers over broken rock ledges into the town 

of Cahar 



DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

of the estate. It lay somewhat too high for wheat, distinctly so for 
corn. Except for the cattle that flecked the upland fields far and 
wide, the potato was most at home. Fourteen distinct varieties of this 
native tuber of the Andes, several of them unknown in the North, grew 
on the hacienda. In one field women were digging potatoes large as 
small muskmelons, though nearby were other patches still red or purple 
with blossoms. 

The average wage of the Indian peons was five cents a day, with 
huasi-pongo, — space for their miserable chozas in which the only 
furniture consisted of a few odds and ends of home-made pottery and 
some sheepskins which, spread on the earth floor by night, served the 
family, its guinea-pigs and mangy curs, as bed. The women and chil- 
dren worked for nothing, wages being reckoned by family rather than 
individually, except that the women who milked the cows were each 
paid a dollar a month. In reality, the Indians were serfs of the estate. 
When first hired, they are enganchados, " hooked " by a labor agent, 
and having spent their " advance " in a prolonged chicha debauch, must 
often be arrested and forced to carry out their part of the contract, 
usually remaining for years, if not a lifetime, in debt to the hacendado. 
It would be an error, however, to look upon their condition from our 
northern point of view. Any custom taken out of its native environ- 
ment has a far more serious aspect than the reality warrants. The 
Indian, trained during many generations of Inca rule to avoid all 
personal initiative or responsibility, accepts by choice this patriarchal 
arrangement. The majority had been attached to the hacienda since 
birth ; giving the community the aspect of one immense family. Each 
household had its little plot of ground for its own garden, and the 
privilege of pasturing a small flock or herd. Yet the owners have 
the best of the bargain. Nearer the capital were estates where en- 
ganchados Indians made adobe bricks at ten cents a day, with huasi- 
pongo and food, making daily some three hundred each, which the 
owner sold at seventy-five cents a hundred. 

The snow-peak of Sincholagua and the rugged, ice-capped ridge of 
Rumifiaui faced the hacienda. Though little higher, the place was in- 
finitely colder than Quito in its mountain pocket, for here we caught 
the full sweep of the winds off the ice-fields. By dark, we were 
both huddled in the hacienda dining-room, bleak and comfortless in 
spite of its extravagant trinkets from the outer world. The peons, 
for all their awe of their youthful lord, could not deny themselves the 
pleasure of grouping noiselessly before the door as we ate, listening to 

169 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the strange tongue — not Quichua, stranger still, not even Spanish — 
which their erudite master spoke with this traveler from unknown 
parts, who came on foot, carrying his own load, like any Indian. The 
crack of the door grew ever wider, the broad, expressionless faces ever 
more numerous, until a draft of the bitter mountain night air caused 
" His Grace " to glance up in annoyance. Both crack and faces dis- 
appeared silently and suddenly, but came again many times before 
we each crawled early under four heavy blankets. 

Next morning the highway, no longer cobbled, but wide and smooth, 
without wheeled traffic, soon brought snow-clad Illinaza into full 
sight before me. So skillfully did it bear me upward that by noon I 
was crossing the great paramo of the Nudo de Tiopullo, without the 
consciousness of having climbed at all. The Andean paramo, for 
which we have no exact English word, is not the sharp mountain peak 
my imagination had pictured, but is used of any broad plain so lofty 
that not even the hardy Indian will live upon it, where quinua, most 
cold-blooded of domestic plants, refuses to grow, a drear treeless upland 
covered only with a tough brown bunch-grass that gives it somewhat 
the aspect of our virgin prairies. To a northerner in motion, it was 
not uncomfortable by sunshiny day, but no one passes these lofty plains 
at night by choice. Only a rare shepherd's shelter of stones and ichu 
dots the cold-brown immensity. The shivering highway hurried due 
south across it, bringing to view another sea-blue hoyo and, barely 
pausing for a last glance back at the faint peak of Cotacache and the 
long bulk of Pichincha, grown mere parts of a broad, hazy, tilted 
horizon, raced downward into the softer valley. 

Some seventy-five miles south of Quito begins a veritable desert. 
From a distance the ranges to right and left seem green, yet the 
ascending valley grows so dry and arid that even the scanty scrub trees 
die of thirst. At the top of a barren divide I met head-on, panting 
harder than I, and moving no faster, the little tri-weekly train from the 
coast, crowded with dust-laden, weary passengers. Almost sheer 
above me stood forth the beautiful cone of snow-clad Cotopaxi, 
equalled in symmetry on all the earth's surface only by Fujiyama. 
To the left the hoary head of Tungaragua, far away in the blue haze of 
the hot, tropical Oriente it looks down upon, rose gradually higher into 
the sky. Then the highway descended and went ever more swiftly 
downward into a half-arid hole in the ground, and by three I was 
tramping the cobbled streets of Ambato, the " winter " resort of 
wealthy quitenos, a mere 8000 feet above sea-level. To one accustomed 

170 



DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

to loftier Quito, it had a tranquil, half-languid air; its people were 
more friendly, lacking that suggestion of belligerency common to 
quitefios. There was, indeed, something pleasing about it that I had 
never yet seen in Ecuador. It reminded one mildly of Egypt, in air 
and odor, and the dust sweeping across from the barren, arid hills 
that wall it in. The market of this town, hung midway between the 
tropics and the temperate zone, offers the fruits of both — aguacates 
and mangoes side by side with apples, pears, peaches, and cherries — 
the native capuli, at five cents a peck — beside raspberries and black- 
berries, and the perennial " f ru-u-u-till-a-a-as ! " (strawberries) that 
are singsung daily through the streets of Quito. It was from the 
market-place of Ambato that I caught my first glimpse of Chimborazo, 
the giant of the Andes, just the crown of its long, saw-like glacier 
ridge brilliant white against the steely highland sky, as it stood on 
tiptoe peering over the barren ridges of Carhuairazo. 

Barely had I entered the hotel when its dishevelled boy-servants 
crowded around me to ask if I were an " andarin." Peyrounel, it 
proved, had once favored the establishment with his distinguished, if 
financially disadvantageous, presence. I pleaded too colorless gar- 
ments to merit the title. To these Andean village youths the arrival 
of so romantic a being was what that of the yearly circus is to our 
towns of the far interior. Yet when I offered any of them double his 
present wage to accompany me and carry a few pounds of my pack, 
they shook their heads and shrunk fearfully away. 

It is not, as I gradually learned to my growing astonishment, merely 
because they know no better that the people of the Andes sleep on 
wooden beds. In Quito I had found many who refused to use the 
imported springs, and I know at least two doctors who prescribed 
wooden beds for kidney trouble. Here in Ambato a perfectly re- 
spectable spring-bed had been completely floored over, and the un- 
suspecting gringo, instead of landing on a soft and yielding mattress, 
found himself on such a couch as a thinly carpeted floor might be. 
Nor was this by any means the last bed out of which I pulled the 
lumber and spread the woven-reed estera above the barrel-hoop 
springs. 

Ambato claims the title of " Athens of Ecuador " ; and, indeed, four 
of the country's principal writers lived and died here, which is more 
than can be said of the capital. The place of honor in the main plaza, 
gorgeous with geraniums of every shade of red, is occupied by the 
statue of Juan Montalvo, commonly rated the country's chief liter- 

171 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

ary light. In Ambato Juan Leon Mera wrote his " Cumanda," the 
accepted classic among Ecuador's novels; and one may still visit the 
family of Luis Martinez, whose " A la Costa " is worthy a place in 
South American literature, if only for its magnificent descriptions of 
tropical scenery. 

I left Ambato on a morning so cold that gloves would have been wel- 
come ; one of those mornings, frequent in Ecuador, when the sun rises 
like a beauty of the harem pushing aside the soft, white curtains of 
her alcove, when the mountains, at the bases of which dense masses of 
clouds and mist have gathered, seem gigantic altars on pedestals of 
marble. Soon the sun grew ardent and imperious, capriciously burning 
away the mist-curtains of the night, blazing down unrestrained on the 
rolling plains of Huachi, so arid and monotonous. The road lay deep 
in sand across a half-desert, with no other adornment than the fences 
of cabuya, of the cactus family, that replace the dividing ditches or 
mud field-walls further north, to mark the limits of the poor heritages 
of the Indians. The chief industry here is the weaving of a coarse 
cloth from the fibers of the cabuya blanca. Here and there a capuli 
tree persisted, and impenetrable, bushy clumps of the thorny sigse 
bristled aggressively. The few planted fields were sparse and drear, 
though near the town, where the thirsty arenales had been transformed 
by irrigation into patches of green on which the desert-weary eyes 
rested gratefully, grew the strawberry, large and fragrant. 

Higher and higher rose the world, though so imperceptibly that the 
ascent was noted only because the landscape opened out to ever greater 
vistas. It was a day of climax in volcanoes. Around the circle of the 
spreading horizon the white crests of no fewer than eight of the great 
vent-holes of the earth grew up about me, until I paused on a high 
ridge to study them. To the right, for a time looking like a single mass 
of rock and snow, stretched long, saw-toothed Carhuairazo, with Chim- 
borazo rising behind it; then gradually the great, glacier-blue dome 
of this Everest of America detached itself and stood forth in all its 
immensity. Far behind, yet perfectly clear in spite of the blue haze of 
some forty miles distance, cone-shaped Cotapaxi, once so savage in its 
destruction, reared itself into the sky-line like an occidental twin sister 
of Fujiyama. To the left, in military precision, three snow-clads 
stood shoulder to shoulder — Sincholagua, Antisana, and one above 
which rose a column of smoke that marked it as Sangai, most active of 
the western world, but a few days before in destructive eruption. 
Then came the glacier-clad, rounded cone of Tungarahua, keeping its 

172 




Indians carrying a grand piano across the plaza of Cafiar on a journey to the interior 




The Indians of Ecuador draw their droves of cattle on after them by playing a weird, mourn- 
ful "music" on the bocina, made of a section of bamboo 



DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

eternal watch over the tropical Oriente, and to the south, noblest of all, 
peering forth first in the early mists, and growing in grandeur all the 
morning, stood dreaded El Altar, its beauty now completely unveiled, 
a fantastic mass of peaks and pinnacles, like some phantom city of 
ice. 

For hours the snow-peaked horizon continued. Across the sands 
of Huachi travelers had been few; toward noon they grew plentiful. 
Around every turn appeared Indians and their four-footed competitors, 
with such monotonous persistency that I needed a cudgel to drive out 
of my way the asses which, expressionless and impassive as their 
masters, were inclined to march serenely on, irrespective of human 
obstacles. The rare chagras, or tawny countrymen, who live in their 
chozas along the way, were interesting only as evidence of how clod- 
like man may become. At Mocha, where I halted in the early after- 
noon, the deep-blue ice-fields of Chimborazo lay piled into the sky 
overhead, a mountain still, though the town stands more than two miles 
above the sea. All the following morning its arctic dome towered 
close on my right as I plodded along its gentle slope not far below the 
snow line, often waist-deep in the ruts which generations of pack- 
animals and Indians had worn in the brown, uninhabited paramo, 
dreary with long, slightly rolling stretches of bunch-grass, across which 
I only now and then overtook a mule-train, the drivers wrapped to 
their ears in their heavy ponchos. Behind, across a hazy valley, now 
more than forty miles away, the symmetrical cone of Cotapaxi gleamed 
faintly forth in a new dress of snow that had fallen during the night. 
A cobbled highway ran along the bottom of a slight hollow some dis- 
tance off, but travelers had scorned it so long in favor of the rutted 
paramo that grass was grown high between its cobbles ; and at length, 
as if it resented the abandonment, it swung off in the direction of 
Cajabamba and was gone. 

The dozen ruts across the paramo finally joined forces to form a 
kind of road that, turning its back on Chimborazo, around whose white 
head a storm was brewing, struck off toward a long, undulating, hazy 
valley backed by blue heaps of ranges. Gradually I descended to al- 
most a desert again, by a road deep in sand, rising and falling over 
countless sand-knolls, the peaked, grass-covered huts of Indians tossed 
like abandoned old straw hats far up the flanks of the drear mountain- 
sides on either hand. At one of these I found the first use for my new 
revolver. An enormous dog, plainly bent on destruction, bounded out 
upon me without a sound, halted abruptly with a faint yelp as I pressed 

173 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the trigger, turned a complete somersault, and fell feet upward, like 
a captive turtle, not two yards from me. 

Ordinarily there is little to be feared from the sneaking curs of all 
colors that swarm about every hut throughout the length of the Andes. 
Before the Conquest, tradition has it, the Indians had only the mute 
allcu, now exterminated — at least, it is certain that none of those that 
remain are mute. These degenerate descendants of the animals 
brought over by the Spaniards rival the original chaos of sound as they 
rush out in cowardly packs upon any stranger — especially a non- 
Indian, for as the white man's dog abhors an Indian, so do these a 
white man — while their masters gaze stolidly on, without so much as 
attempting to call them off. The Indian of the Andes does not raise 
dogs ; he has them merely because he is too passive to get rid of them. 
The curs are never treated as pets ; the only caress they ever receive is 
a kick or a prod from which they retreat sluggishly with a cowardly 
yelp, even if the weapon misses its aim ; they are never fed, but exist 
on such offal as the Indian himself disdains. A mountaineer to whom 
I put the question once briefly expressed the viewpoint of his race: 

" How can we help having many dogs, patron ? They breed so 
often ! " 

From the village of San Andres, picturesquely backed by the ice- 
palace of El Altar, architecturally as diffuse as the Castle of Schwerin, 
a spreading highway, bordered by endless cactus hedges, led toward a 
great sandy plain far ahead, a small forest of eucalypti that marked 
the site of Riobamba giving it center. Further on, for all the aridity, 
was plenty of half-grown corn, with numberless peaked, thatched huts 
peering above the vegetation on either hand. At the entrance to Rio- 
bamba I saw the first llamas of my South American journey. Once 
an Indian passed driving a llama and an ass hitched together ; further 
on several of these absurd " Peruvian sheep," pasturing beyond the 
cactus hedge, craned their long necks to gaze curiously after me. 
Times without number I had been assured that not only was the llama 
never a draft or a milch animal, but that it could never be ridden; 
that it would carry exactly a hundred pounds and would irrevocably 
lie down if another ounce were added, and that it could under no 
circumstances be urged beyond a slow, dignified walk. Imagine my 
surprise, then, when suddenly I beheld a llama bestridden by a full- 
grown Indian come down the road at a brisk trot, and watched them 
fade away in the eucalyptus-lined distance beyond. In the town be- 
yond there was one llama for every two donkeys. 

174 



DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

Riobamba, chief city between Quito and the coast, is commonly 
described as " lying at the foot of Chimborazo." The description must 
not be taken too literally. I had imagined a cold, haughty little town 
snuggled together in a lap of the high Andes ; but if Riobamba lies at 
the foot of Chimborazo, so, in only somewhat lesser degree, does Guaya- 
quil. The traveler turns his back on the glacier-clad giant of the 
Andes and tramps a long half-day before he comes to what, in situation 
and general appearance, might be a town on the sandy prairies of 
western Nebraska. Its monotonously right-angled streets are un- 
usually wide, painfully cobbled, and swirling with sand ; its architecture 
is drearily like that of any other Andean city. It has been several 
times destroyed by earthquake ; were it not, like Quito, more than two 
miles aloft, it would be even more often destroyed by its personal 
habits. At sunrise thrice a week most of the town turns out to 
watch the trains that have " overnighted " here leave for Quito and 
Guayaquil respectively; whence its suggestion of some frontier 
village of railroad hotels in our Western states. Unlike Quito, Rio- 
bamba has a street-car. It is a platform on wheels with a flat roof 
supported by gas-pipes, under which are some crosswise boards that 
are called seats with the same Latin-American tolerance with which a 
place to lie on the floor is called a bed, and a place the traveler may 
possibly be able to make his way through is called a road. Like some 
Andean newspapers, it appears " every now and then," when a pair of 
blase, world-weary mules drag it across town to the station and back, 
usually only on train days. Many ride, and the more poorly dressed 
seem to pay for the privilege ; but the Indians take good care not to be 
caught on any such risky, new-fangled contraption. 

There is commonly not a " sight " to be seen in Riobamba, unless 
it be the stern, white face of Chimborazo looking down upon the city 
from the middle distance to the north. The traveler who chances upon 
the town of a Saturday or Sunday, however, will find it a place of 
interest. Then the Indian population of a thickly inhabited region 
comes from thirty or more miles around to what is rated Ecuador's 
greatest market. The sandy plaza, larger than an American city block, 
is so densely packed with stolid thick-set men and women in gray felt 
hats and crude-colored blankets that only by constant struggle can a 
purchaser thread his way across it. From my room on the corner 
above, not a foot of open ground was visible. The scene was like a 
swarming of myriad ants of many colors ; like a great Oriental rug un- 
dulating in the sunshine. As one crowds along between the rows of 

175 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

hawkers, all the products of the region seem to pass in procession. 
Here were entire families who had jogged many miles to town under 
the produce of their chacras; there, a man with only a half-grown 
chicken or a gaunt pig for sale ; beyond, a woman sat all day long selling 
bit by bit, at a net total of perhaps ten cents, the bushel of native cher- 
ries which, together with her babe, she has carried at least twenty miles. 
Here was a pile of ugly native shoes — of very limited demand — 
there, homespun blankets and ponchos in colors that scream audibly, be- 
fore they mellowed by sun and rain and the habits of their wearers. 
Every domestic animal and fowl known to the Andes of to-day was 
displayed ; cheap knives, tin spoons, trinkets from foreign lands, native 
plants and bulbs ; herbs that still make up the aboriginal pharmacopoeia, 
as in pre-Conquest days ; tiny packages of dyestuffs that are doled out 
a penny-worth at a time ; corn bread and barley bread, even a few soggy 
wheat biscuits — though the price of the latter is all but prohibitive — 
cherries, strawberries, oranges, aguacates, a hard native taffy known 
as alfenique, pears, apricots, peaches, a hard little apple that never 
matures, pineapples, nearly all the grains and vegetables known in 
our own land, and even a greater variety of corn and potatoes ; and a 
countless confusion of other products that sell for what would seem far 
less than the cost of bringing them to town. Beyond, was a tercena, 
an open-air butchershop, where Indian women hacked into bits the 
cows and sheep that had succumbed to amateur butchers, at the same 
time fighting off the fifteen dogs which, by actual count, prowled about 
the stand. In one corner scores of tawny, bare-legged Indians squatted 
beside heavy grass- wrapped loads of snowy ice, Riobamba's only 
means of cooling her beverages. If one knew enough of the bastard 
Quichua of Ecuador to ask its origin, the stolid fellows threw an ex- 
pressionless glance toward the icy dome of Chimborazo. About them 
hovered something akin to the glamour that surrounds the Arctic ex- 
plorer. All day long was an endless motley going and coming through 
the adjacent streets and plazas, amid which the imagination could 
easily drop back four centuries and fancy what this Andean world 
may have been before the coming of the white man. 

It was so brilliant a Sunday that Chimborazo seemed to hang almost 
sheer above the town, and the whole bulk of snow-clad Tungarahua 
loomed clearly forth from its tropical home, when I set out after mid- 
day for what I had been told was an easy half-day's tramp. Within 
an hour — so sudden are the changes in weather zones here — an icy 
rain was pouring down upon my shoulders bowed with the weight of a 

176 




Ruins of the fortress of Ingapirca, near Cafiar, where the Inca Huayna Ccapac is said to 
have received the first news of the landing of white men on the coast of his Empire 




A mild example of the "road" through southern Ecuador. The trail pitches and rolls 

over earthquake-gashed, utterly uninhabited regions, sinking far out of sight in the 

quebrada in the middle distance, then climbs away across the world until the hill 

here seen sinks to a dot on the landscape 



DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

hundred-pound pack. At last I sprawled to a summit with an all- 
embracing view of the en.tire district of Riobamba, the city itself a 
mere fleck far below in an opaque-blue landscape roofed by purple- 
black clouds through which the unseen sun cast a single faint shaft, as 
from a weak spotlight. The rain, which in Ecuador falls in zones 
sharply cut off one from another, ceased abruptly at the top of the bar- 
rier. Here were two roads from which to choose, and for hours there- 
after I could not know whether the one that descended a sharp valley 
beside a tiny stream led anywhere near where I wished to go. Well 
down the bone-dry vale were scattered hamlets of grass and mud huts 
of a half-wild tribe of Indians, the men in white goatskin trousers that 
gave them the appearance of shaggy-legged Greek satyrs, the dwellings 
often hung far up the steep walls that enclosed the growing stream. 
Many of the inhabitants ran away at my approach; the rest stared at 
me from safe heights as I sped on down the valley. Ugly white curs 
abounded; in the scanty trees a bird sang now and then; but for the 
most part only the sound of the stream leaping from rock to rock 
broke the mountain-walled silence. 

Cold darkness fell, and still the broken trail descended swiftly. At 
rare intervals a corner of the moon peered through the clouds. Then, 
in the blackest of nights, the road forked again, giving me another 
random choice. A wild, windy, uninhabited hour beyond, the path 
fell suddenly away under my feet and I found myself involved in a 
labyrinth of quebradas, holes and chasms large as two-story houses, 
as if the region had been wrecked by a long series of earthquakes. A 
score of times I climbed down hand over hand into immense ruts with 
walls high above my head, certain I had lost my way, yet with no other 
choice than to press on. Two hours, at least, this riot of the earth's 
surface continued before there appeared suddenly the lights of a con- 
siderable town, dimly seen through the night across a wet, blurred 
valley backed by an all but invisible mountainside. A trail picked 
itself together again under my feet, pitched headlong down to a roar- 
ing little river straddled by an aged stone bridge, ghostly white in the 
pallid moonlight, and led me stumbling into the railroad village of 
Guamote, still booming with the tomtoms of the Sunday fiesta that 
had left its scattered debris of drunken Indians through all the length 
of the town. 

From Guamote I followed the silent but well-kept Quito-Guayaquil 
Railway through a landscape like that of southern Texas, winding in 
and out between dreary hills peopled only by a rare weather-worn 

177 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

shepherd in goatskin trousers ; then across broad stretches of sear- 
brown, slightly rolling desert scantily covered with bunch-grass, the 
sand sweeping over it in clouds. From Palmira, — two dismal little 
station buildings at some 11,000 feet elevation — the railroad drops 
steadily for all the more than a hundred miles to the coast. Some way 
down the descending valley, the land turned almost suddenly from 
dreary brown to the green of another rain-belt that gradually climbed 
the ever-higher mountain walls that shut me in. Beyond Alausi 
next morning I made a swift descent, even swifter by sliding down 
the face of the notorious " Devil's Nose," where the track mounts 
in three sections, one above the other, and reached the little town 
of Huigra in time for " breakfast." Here, in a green valley be- 
tween high hills falling abruptly into a prattling stream, are the main 
offices and hospitals of the railroad, and an American atmosphere, 
tempered with whiffs of England and Ecuador, to which the fever and 
bubonic of Guayaquil do not mount, nor the ills of Quito descend. 

At Huigra my route was to turn southward over the enclosing moun- 
tain wall. But I had no objection to coasting down into the tropics 
on a side-trip to Guayaquil — except Guayaquil itself; and when the 
chief engineer promised a screened refuge from sun to sun, I accepted 
the invitation gladly. All that is necessary to travel from Huigra to 
sea-level is to get something on wheels of the right gage and " let her 
slide " — or rather, let her slide within very definite limits, lest one reach 
the bottom far sooner and in poorer condition than was planned. 
With a native employee behind, the two of us sat on the sheer front 
edge of the track automobile, the experienced hand of the chief on 
the brake, and roared in and out and ever down the mountain canon, 
the towering walls on either side rising higher above us with every 
yard forward, a foaming river keeping us a not much slower company. 
Huigra is at kilometer 117. At no we suddenly reached the tree-line. 
Forests in striking contrast to the bare upland plateau of Ecuador grew 
up about us as if by magic. Foaming mountain brooks dashed down 
from either towering wall to join the river — and to save the company 
the expense of building water-tanks. Swiftly the trees changed in 
species, — from hardy highland shrubs to voluptuous tropical growths, 
till the airy bamboo, noblest of ferns, bowed to us in graceful dignity 
from the crowded forest as we screamed past. 

Before noon we swung out of the gorge I had followed from Pal- 
mira, and halted at Bucay. It had been like dropping in two hours 
from May to a dense and heavy July, from a northern scene to one like 

178 



DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

that of Panama, with the same sticky atmosphere, negroes, and out- 
door life. Here we took possession of the empty pay-car on the rear 
of the day's passenger-train and sat with our feet on the back railing, 
watching the dead-flat tropical world run away and shrink up to 
nothingness behind us. The track lay straight as a cannon-ball's course 
through the tunnel of forest and jungle. Indians and their gay gar- 
ments had disappeared; here were only the colors of nature. Along 
the way, thatched houses of split bamboo slouched in languid attitudes, 
half-black and slightly dressed families peering from their sort of hole- 
in-the-wall verandas behind partly raised blinds hinged at the top. 
For all the lazy langor of the scene, jungle products succeeded each 
other swiftly. Cacao, then palm-trees gladdened the eyes ; the air 
grew heavier; now and then a great field of sugar-cane broke briefly 
the endless tunnel of forest; beautiful bamboo groves alternated with 
immense tropical trees cutting into the sky-line. 

The natives,, afoot or ahorse, used the track as a trail, for all else 
was impenetrable wilderness. Here and there the jungle crowded so 
close that it side-swiped the car, though along the way were many 
section-gangs fighting it back with machetes, the favorite tool and 
weapon of the costeno, who saluted us — or, more exactly, my com- 
panion — as we sped past. Pineapple fields grew numerous ; at sta- 
tions the fruit lay in piles at the feet of indifferent chocolate-colored 
vendors. The brown castor-bean on its small green trees appeared; 
splendid cocoanut palms, heavy with nuts, heralded the sea ; maidenly 
slender rubber-trees; broad fields of light-green rice, growing arm in 
arm with Indian corn; the plebeian bread-fruit tree, with its broad 
leaves fancily cut as with scissors in the hands of an inventive child; 
and always gigantic tropical trees cut fantastically into the sky-line 
of the light-gray day above. Behind, always, fixed as fate itself, the 
dim and clouded range of the Andes, a giant wall, blue and unbroken, 
shut off the world beyond. Here and there a hoary peak showed 
above the clouds, so high one could not believe it possible. Far off in 
the heavens like a great cloud, Chimborazo stood white and immovable. 
As in the forest one sees only trees, so only down here, looking at the 
chain as a whole, could one realize the loftiness of those realms where 
one had been living for months more than two miles above the sea. 

Naked brown babies, huts on ever longer legs, hammocks, grew 
numerous, and languid loungers to fill them ; here and there appeared 
a Chinaman ; some large towns, bamboo-built and all on stilts, like a 
thin-shanked army ; buzzards circling lazily overhead amid scents that 

179 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

whispered of plague and sudden death. Then on either hand began to 
appear the low, dense-wooded hills of Duran, more properly deep green 
islands in this flood-time. Fluffy white flowers in myriads smiled 
bravely above the black waters that would soon swallow them up. 
The vast mountain wall across the world behind had grown a shade 
bluer when we drew into Duran on the banks of the Guayas, and brush- 
ing both clear with housewifely care of any lurking mosquito, dodged 
through the double screen-doors into the railroad quarters. Here were 
shower-baths and phonographs, New York papers, a frequent nasal 
• twang, and only outside and seeming far off as in some distant place, 
the scent of Ecuador. 

Sudden death is reputed to fly chiefly by night along the Guayas. 
So only when the sun was high did we venture across to Ecuador's 
metropolis and far-famed death-trap, Guayaquil. Outwardly, the low, 
heat-steaming city looked far cleaner than Quito. But here filth grants 
no immunity. During three hours we saw the black funeral street- 
car pass nine times — and by no means all the population can afford 
so splendid an exit from the world. Yet here were electric tramways 
for the first time since Bogota, larger shops and more ambitious dis- 
plays than in Quito, and signs of greater commercial activity. The 
houses were of wood or split bamboo, low and earthquake-fearing, 
all the windows with wooden blinds hinged at the top, from behind 
which peered half the female population, seldom seen on the streets. 
Compared to Quito, it was a town of no color at all. Among the 
foreign residents was a curious indifference to local dangers, always 
seeming greater at a distance than on the spot. Americans yawned at 
the mention of " Yellow Jack " and Bubonic and went about their 
business with as little apparent worry as a New Yorker of death by 
a street accident. Nothing in the attitude of the people suggested an 
unusually precarious hold on life — except that ever recurrent black 
funeral car, electrically operated, as if horses were not fast enough 
for its incessant labors. Long before the sun had lost its mastery of 
the situation, we had retreated again to Duran. The lone traveler 
in far-off lands runs many perils, but if I must succumb to one of 
them, let it be with a fighting chance, not this insidious, sneaking death 
that flies on all but invisible wings. 

Next morning the passenger-train lifted us back to Huigra, where a 
new experience awaited me. That evening I sat writing in the rail- 
road quarters. Two fellow-countrymen were parading the broad, sec- 
ond-story veranda of the light wooden building. The only other sound 

180 



DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

was the muffled chatter of the stream below. Suddenly the heavy table 
beneath my arm began to move as at some spiritualist seance, the 
windows took to rattling as if in some sudden terror to escape from 
their frames, the wall decorations swung back and forth like pendu- 
lums, and for what seemed a long minute the entire building shook as 
with a paludic fever. I opened my mouth to protest against what I 
took for a moment to be physical exuberance of the veranda paraders ; 
but I closed it again as I realized that I had passed through my first 
earthquake, and had gone on writing for a line or more before I recog- 
nized the good fortune of being in a wooden house. Outside, the 
strollers had not even interrupted their chat, except to remark, " Pretty 
good one, eh ? " and when the natives in the town below had left off 
shouting, evidently in an attempt to scare off the dreaded spirit within 
the bowels of the earth, life returned to its customary languor, the 
silence broken only by the stream still prattling on through the dark- 
ness. In the morning the telegraph wire brought word that the in- 
struments of Duran had registered seven quakes, and that several 
houses and a church had fallen in the adobe interior. 

On the morning of February 24th I crossed the little bridge over 
Huigra's garrulous stream and, trailing away up the mountain wall 
that shuts off the railroad valley on the south, disappeared from the 
modern world. All but twenty pounds of my baggage I had turned 
over to a native iietero, proprietor of a mule-and- jackass express com- 
pany that operated as far south as Cuenca. It was in the nature of 
things, however, that even under a light load I should pay for my de- 
scent to Huigra by much sweating toil, before raising again its paltry 
4000 feet to the two miles or more of the Andean chain. In the valley 
a brilliant sun set me dripping; above was driving mist to chill me 
through if I dared to pause, and out of which now and then floated the 
gentle exhortations of unseen arrieros to their toiling animals: 

" Anda, macho ! Mula, caramba ! Vaya, sinvergiienza ! " 

An experienced gringo had assured me I was approaching the most 
impassable region in Ecuador, a place where it rained steadily and 
heavily a hundred and four weeks a year, where my mules would sink 
to their ears in mud and be left to perish, where I myself would 
infallibly die of exposure if my caravan were overtaken by night out 
on the lofty paramo. I easily forestalled the peril to my mules, and 
the second I resolved to avoid by not letting night overtake me. 

It was not, certainly, an ideal road. There were places where the 
writhing trail was for miles a series of earth ridges with deep ditches 

181 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

of mud and water between, like an endless corduroy road, and these 
made hard going indeed for laden animals. For as often as one of 
them set foot on one of these camelones, as they are called in the Andes, 
it slipped off into the muddy ditch between, as likely backward as for- 
ward, giving a very exaggerated imitation of the gait of a camel. In 
fact, it is this constant slipping and sliding of passing pack-trains that 
turns certain wet regions of the Andes into camelones. In places the 
mud-reeking slope climbed steep mountain-sides through narrow trails 
worn twenty feet deep, down or up which horses or cargo mules 
stumbled and sprawled constantly, threatening to smash their packs 
against the side walls or underfoot. 

But it was a route far worse for horsemen than for a man afoot. I 
stepped blithely from ridge to ridge, not only dryshod but at my regular 
pace, easily leaving all four-footed competitors behind ; and while 
there were germs of truth in the warning that a mule and his cargo, 
slipping and falling upon me in one of the gullies, might bring my 
journey to a halt, the very simple remedy for that possibility was not 
to be found loitering beneath an animal when he fell. Donkey car- 
casses and the rain-bleached skeletons of mules and horses were 
frequent along the way ; and always, now broken, now for a time in- 
cessant, came out of the blind mist the raucous bawling of arrieros : 
" Anda, mula, caramba ! " 

The dense, heavy fog turned to pouring rain. Indeed there were 
evidences to verify the assertion that this was one of the zones of 
Ecuador where the rainy season reigns perennially. In midafternoon 
I passed a few Indian hovels. I had been warned to stop for the 
night in the last of these rare habitations, if I would not end my way- 
ward career out on the arctic paramo of the Nudo de Azuay. But 
the stolid-featured native assured me there were others a half-league 
on, and I had climbed twice that distance across a dismal stretch of 
bunch-grass without a sign of life, except a scanty herd of wild, shaggy, 
rain-drenched cattle, before I realized that the Indian had told the old 
lie to be rid of an importunate guest. Within me there grew the con- 
viction that, in spite of my best intentions, I should some day shoot a 
large, round, soft-nosed, 38-caliber hole through some Indian for send- 
ing me " further up " into the uninhabited night. 

However, there I was, exactly where, of all places in Ecuador, I 
had so often been warned in several tongues not to let night overtake 
me. The gray walls about me dimmed like a lamp turned out. These 
paramo trails being, even by day, only a straggling of interwoven paths 

182 



DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

often effaced, it was not in the order of things that I should keep the 
route long in unmitigated night. For a time I stumbled along an 
irregular, rock-littered ground, full of leg-breaking holes, picking every 
step ahead with my stick, like a blind man, and even at that now and 
then sprawling on all fours. As to direction, I could only trust to 
luck. Then I felt water-soaked bunch-grass under foot, and all efforts 
to find the trail again were wasted. Vaguely I felt that I had come 
out on the nose of a mountain. Through the rain-drenched night 
there came faintly to my ears the sound of a waterfall, and from 
somewhere far off the dismal howling of a dog rode by on the raging 
wind. The ground under my feet took on the angle of a steep roof ; 
it required stick, hands, and extreme vigilance to keep from pitching 
headlong down into the bottomless unknown. I felt my way inch by 
inch several hundred feet downward without finding a level space as 
large as my hand. In the end I could only sit down on my bundle in 
the mud, brace my feet against a tuft of bunch-grass and, piling my 
most perishable possessions in my lap, button my llama-hair poncho 
over my head, sup on a three-inch butt of bread, and settle down to 
keep my precarious seat until daylight. 

He who fancies an Ecuadorian mountainside a pleasant night's lodg- 
ing-place, merely because it is near the equator, has still something of 
geography to learn. Strangely enough, it might have been worse. The 
poncho was almost impervious to cold, entirely so to rain. As the 
Scottish chieftain of earlier days soaked his tartan before lying down 
for a night in the highland heather, so the wetness of all about me 
seemed to add warmth. The rain redoubled, yet I should scarcely 
have known it but for its pelting above my head. I dozed now and 
then into a nap. After one of them I peered out into the wintry night, 
to find the mist alive with hardy fireflies so large that those which 
started up near me seemed to my dull fancy the lanterns of some 
prowling band. Twice some animal, perhaps a wild mountain-horse, 
romped by me. When I looked out again a bright moon was shining, 
yet I felt too comfortable as I was to take advantage of it to push on, 
and fell asleep again, not without a drowsy misgiving that some diligent 
hunter might try a shot at my huddled, shaggy form standing out in 
the moonlight against the swift mountainside ; until I remembered that 
no native ever ventures out upon an Andean paramo except in the full 
light of day. 

Dawn showed the lost trail zigzagging in three branches down the 
face of the mountain. The waterfall lay directly below me, yet so 

i83 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

steep was the slope on which I was perched that I had to crawl back 
again up the trail on all fours and descend with it. Far away across 
a valley so deep I could not see its bottom, lay in plain sight what I 
knew to be the town of Cafiar, a mere white speck halfway up the 
great mountainside beyond. It is chiefly noted for its outlook upon 
the world. From a distance, it seemed to hang upright on the vertical 
mountain flank; once arrived, I found it occupied the flat top of one 
of the countless hills that pile higher and higher into the sky, to 
culminate in a great Andean chain. Here was a land of stone. 
Everywhere, in field and valley, rocks lay more profusely and far 
larger in size than on any abandoned New England farm. If the 
tumble-down old town of Cafiar had any features at all different from 
hundreds of others down the crest of the Andes, it was its large pro- 
portion of stone buildings over those of sun-baked mud. 

It is perhaps the existence of stone, rarer to the north, that accounts 
for the presence near Cafiar of the first ruins of unquestionabip4nca 
origin. Their victorious march to the north, too, was so quickly fol- 
lowed by the arrival of the Spaniards, that the Children of the Sun 
left no permanent works about Quito and beyond. The imperial 
highway from Cuzco to what is to-day Ecuador, built by a race less 
fearful of the lofty places and mighty canons of the Andes, was 
more direct than the modern haphazard route. Where it descended 
from the paramo of Azuay and climbed out of the gorge beyond, there 
was built a fortress and a tambo for the housing of the imperial 
cortege that is known to-day as Ingapirca, which some believe to be 
that same Tomebamba where Huayna Ccapac, the Great, was born, 
and where the news of the landing on the coast of a strange tribe cut 
short his journey southward in his old age. 

He who would visit Ingapirca must have either a guide or a working 
mixture of Spanish and Quichua. I lost myself a dozen times in a 
labyrinth of paths, each leading to an isolated Indian hovel. One 
might have fancied the aboriginals had surrounded the sacred Inca 
relics with a conspiracy of silence, for I was forced at last to drag an 
old man forcibly out of a cluster of cobble-stone huts before he pointed 
out to me a path that wound away upward and disappeared over the 
edge of the world. Along it I came at last in sight of Ingapirca. 
The " Castle of the Gentiles," as it is locally known to-day, sits silent 
and grass-grown on the summit of a rock-knoll from which the eye 
ranges in every direction over a tumbled labyrinth of valleys and ridges. 
They built high, the Incas, as men who preferred to see with their own 

184 




A detail of the " Panama "-hat market of Azogues. The hats are bought unfinished and the 

wholesalers pile one after another on their heads until their faces are all but 

concealed by the protruding "straw" ends 




Arrived at the wholesale establishments of Cuenca, the hats are finished, — the "straw"-ends 

tucked in and cut off, the hats bsaten with wooden mallets on wooden blocks, given 

a sulphur bath and sun-bleached, then folded flat for shipment 



DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

eyes what was going on about them, and they seem to have gloated 
over the unbroken sweep of the cold, invigorating Andean wind. The 
chief ruin is that of a fortress, an oval wall with a sheer rock face 
to the north, and symmetrical stone steps leading up to the entrance 
on the south. Of large cut stones, and with ornamental blind doors, 
or niches, it is so like the monuments of Peru as to leave no doubt 
of its Inca origin. Even on the curves, the stones are so nicely fitted, 
apparently without mortar — though Humboldt reported the discovery 
of a kind of cement between them — that there are few joints for 
which a modern contractor would berate his workmen. The walls 
are double, with earth between them, the inner wall less carefully con- 
structed; and undisturbed centuries have filled the interior of the 
fort to a grass-grown level. Above this rise the remnants of a 
building, only adobe walls with some cut-stone doorways still stand- 
ing; but the many wrought stones to be found in fences and in the 
scattered heaps in which dwell the modern inhabitants of the region, 
suggest that the adobe walls had once a complete casing of cut stone. 
Slight as are the remains, there is still sufficient setting for the 
fancy to picture Huayna Ccapac striding back and forth upon his 
lofty promenade, looking upon his " Four Corners of the Earth," 
and halting in his meditations to watch the imperial chasquis racing 
toward him across the rugged landscape with news of the landing in 
his imperial domains of a pale-faced tribe with hair on their faces. 

Hours of strenuous toil, piloted only by my pocket-compass, brought 
me back to the main route. For a space it was a real highway, faced 
with stone, but soon degenerated into a writhing chaos of ruts and 
rocky subidas, like a road in the throes of an epileptic fit. The sun 
was still high when I caught sight of Biblian, its famous sanctuary 
standing out white and clear against the dull mountainside above the 
town. But it was only in the thickening dusk that I finally climbed 
into it. 

A youth replied to my first inquiry with a " como no ! " — just as un- 
excitedly as if strangers came to Biblian every year or two. In the 
dingy little shop to which he led me, an old woman whose greedy face 
warned me to prepare for exorbitant charges, even before I learned 
she went to church four times a day, hunted up the enormous key 
to an immense room above. In a corner of it stood a bed at least 
a century old, covered with a marvelous lace counterpane, but harder 
than macadam. While I sat at meat — or, more exactly, at vege- 
tables, since Biblian kills its weekly beef on Sunday and by Monday 

185 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

it is gone — the customary delegation of citizens came to offer their 
respects. The town, it proved, was oppressed with a great worry. 
The earthquake of a week before had not merely tumbled down several 
mud church-towers of the region, but had given new life to a prophesy 
that clanged deafeningly at two-second intervals without a break, ex- 
Biblian could not sleep of nights and the priests were reaping a rich 
harvest. All night long I lay like a Hindu ascetic on his couch of 
nails, listening to the exquisite torture of a broken-voiced church-bell 
that clanged deafeningly at two-second intervals without a break, ex- 
cept for a frequent wild, hellish jangling of several minutes' duration. 
When dawn broke, the entire population had already crowded into 
the church for early mass. A bun was not to be had with my morning 
coffee, because my hostess had locked up the shop to attend the second 
ceremony. I ordered " breakfast " for eleven, and a boy came to in- 
form me that I must eat it at nine, since from that hour on senora la 
patrona would again be at church. 

Biblian is a city of pilgrimage. By morning light it proved to be 
surrounded on all sides by fields of corn, with countless capuli-trees 
and masses of geraniums lending it even more color than the varie- 
gated blankets of its inhabitants. The cup-shaped valley was scattered 
with scores of tiled cottages of the half-Indian peasants, the hillsides 
a network of paths and trails to their huts and tiny farms. The chief 
road climbed to the Capilla on a crag well above the town. It was a 
costly, three-story structure richly decorated within, though a dismal 
mud hut served Biblian as school. The Virgin of Biblian is note- 
worthy among a host of her sisters in not having come personally to 
pick out a spot and order the building of her shelter. Perhaps her 
history is still too recent for the successful concoction of such tra- 
ditions. In 1893 the valley of Biblian was choking with drought. 
The local cura, alive to his opportunity, set up an image in a grotto 
on the mountainside and, consulting his barometer, implored rain. 
The drought was broken. In honor of the feat the image was named 
the " Virgin of the Dew," and pilgrims began to flock to Biblian. In 
the volume which he has prepared for their instruction the foresighted 
cura bewails the fact that " We cannot tell in one book the countless 
cures, assistances, protections and life-savings the Blessed Virgen del 
Rocio has done for the faithful from all over Ecuador." In the face 
of the appalling mass of proofs before him he confines himself to none. 
But he does mention the miraculous fact that the first chapel had been 
completed by August of the following year, and that two years later 

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DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

the present " sumptuous, rich, divine " sanctuary was sprinkled with 
holy water. 

Barely was this dry when " the troops of the Liberal party, like the 
barbarians at the gates of Rome, threatened the afflicted capital of the 
Azuay, bringing inevitable ruin " — such, for example, as the curbing 
of the power of the Church — " when the powerful Blessed Virgen del 
Rocio was borne from Biblian to beleaguered Cuenca with fitting 
reverence and in the midst of the most crowded and pompous proces- 
sion in the annals of that Catholic city "-...., whereupon the Liberal 
troops faded quickly away, and redoubled the fame of the Virgin and 
the income of Biblian parish. The Minister Plenipotentiary of the 
Vatican has seen fit to grant a hundred days' indulgence to whoever 
visits the sanctuary, " which indulgence may be applied to souls in 
Purgatory." The trip to Biblian is worth at least that. Lovers of 
justice will rejoice to know that the foresighted cura bids fair to 
enjoy for long years to come his divine — knowledge of barometers. 

It is only a league from Biblian to Azogue's ; an hour's stroll along 
a slight river through almost a forest of capuli-trees, the wild cherries 
hanging in bunches something like the grape, though with only a few 
ripe at a time. Then comes a sudden drop into summer; for the 
climate of Azogues is soft and bland, with little rain. About the town 
were hundreds of tile and thatch-roofed cottages among rich, green 
cornfields, spreading far away up one valley and down another; and 
beyond these were tawny mountain flanks mottled with every color 
from sandy brown to sun-drenched green. 

The town of Quicksilver is rather that of " panama " hats. 
As in San Pablo, Colombia, men, women and children were braiding 
them everywhere; shopkeepers and their clerks made hats in the in- 
tervals between customers, and even while waiting on them; Indian 
and chola women wove them as they tramped along the roads with a 
bundle, and perhaps a child, on their backs, as European peasant 
women knit, or those of other parts of Ecuador spin yarn on their 
crude spindles. I was assured that every living person in Azogues 
knew how to tejar sombreros. The fops themselves were so engaged 
somewhere out of sight. 

The weekly hat-fair of Azogues began on the Friday evening of my 
arrival. As the afternoon declined, there streamed in from every 
point of the compass, from every hut among the surrounding corn- 
fields, men, women, and children, each carrying a newly woven hat, 
bushy with its uncut " straw " ends. A dozen agents from Cuenca 

187 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

bought these as they arrived, never at the price demanded, but after a 
heated bargaining to which, in the end, the weavers always meekly 
yielded. Each buyer seemed to confine himself to some particular 
grade or style; this one to coarse " comunes," that to large sizes, an- 
other to small, and only two or three to the finer weaves. As he 
bought them, each agent piled the hats on his own head until his face 
was completely hidden behind the protruding ends, from the depths 
of which the bargaining went on unabated. 

Saturday, however, is the chief market day of Azogues. As I 
strode out along the highway to Cuenca next morning, throngs were 
pouring into the city from every direction. For a full two hours I 
passed an endless stream of Indians as close together as an army in 
column of squads, the women carrying on their backs every product 
known to southern Ecuador. The men, for the most part, were bur- 
dened only by a half-dozen hats, one atop the other, the untrimmed 
ends hiding their faces as under shaggy straw-colored beards. The 
scene recalled the Great -Trunk Road of India, yet was of vastly less 
interest and variety. He who had once seen an Ecuadorian Indian 
had seen all the procession. A few were weaving the last strands of 
their weekly hat as they hurried by. Most " panama " hats are com- 
pleted on Friday night or in the gray of Saturday's dawn; for the 
maker, frequently overcome by indolence during the week, must bestir 
himself to have his product ready in time for his weekly debauch. 
Before he sallies forth to squander his week's earnings, however, he 
carefully lays away enough to purchase another tuft of " straw," lest 
he have no nest-egg from which to hatch next Saturday's celebration. 
The procession had thinned considerably before it occurred to me to 
count the passersby, and even then 132 persons passed me in a minute, 
each and all bearing something for the market of Azogues. During 
most of the two hours the number had easily doubled that, and this 
was only one of the many roads and trails leading to this little-known 
town far from modern transportation. 

Every house of southern Ecuador has a cross in the center of its 
ridgepole; here they were so elaborate, so covered with devices sym- 
bolic of the religion they represent, that it was only by a stretch of the 
imagination that one could make out the cross itself beneath. Late in 
the morning I came again to the Azogues river, and a typical bridge 
of the Andes, — opportunity to wade thigh-deep for all who travel 
afoot on this main highway to southern Ecuador. Not far beyond, 
there cantered by me several wholesale buyers from the Azogues 

188 




My home in Cuenca, with the Montesinos family. The well-to-do classes of this city live in 

unusual comfort for Ecuador, and have the custom of decorating the walls under the 

projecting roofs, or those of the patio, with exotic scenes painted on the wall itself 




Students of the Colegio of Cuenca, which confers the bachelor degree at the end of a course 

somewhat similar to that of our high schools. Misbehavior is punished by confinement 

in the upright boxes in the background 



DOWN VOLCANO AVENUE 

market, the saddlebags of each bulging with a hundred or more hats, 
stuffed one inside the other. Mile after mile the broad river-valley 
of Cuenca is forested with capuli, eucalyptus, and a Gothic-spired 
willow. Red, tile roofs stand strikingly forth from deep-green corn- 
fields, and thousands of fertile, cultivated acres are shut in by barren, 
sand-faced hills, though there are no imposing peaks south of Cafiar, 
and I had seen none snow-clad since leaving Riobamba. With no 
census for twenty-five years, the metropolis of southern Ecuador, third 
city of the republic, and capital of the rich province of Azuay, esti- 
mates its population at 45,000. Some have it that this great cuenca, 
six leagues long, gouged out of the Andes, was the original Tome- 
bamba, birthplace of Huayna Ccapac. Like Riobamba, the city is 
flat, its wide, cobbled streets, crossing at right angles, stretching their 
chiefly one-story length away in both directions almost as far as the 
eye can see. The buildings are almost all of the sun-baked adobe 
mud that everywhere dominates the architecture of the Andes ; though 
some of the " best families " have striven to decorate their dwellings 
outwardly with huge mural paintings on the eaves-protected walls of 
patio and veranda. 



189 



CHAPTER VIII 

THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR 

AS susceptible Don Giovanni falls under the succeeding spell 
of every pretty face, each blotting out those that went before, 
so the traveler down the backbone of South America fre- 
quently concludes that he has found at last the climate copied from 
the Garden of Eden. Such a spot is Cuenca, dimming by comparison 
its latest rival, Quito, and I find in my notes of the exuberant first day 
there the assertion : " Of all the earth, as far as I know it, Cuenca 
has the most perfect climate." Always cool enough to be mildly 
invigorating to mind and body, yet never cold, it is unexcelled as a 
place for dreamy loafing. The sunshine vastly exceeds the shadow, 
and its situation is peerless — not in the scenery of its surrounding 
mountains, which are distant and low, but in the rich fertility of this 
great vale of Paucarbamba (" Flowery Plain"), as the Incas called it. 
Cuenca has no fitting excuse for not being one of the richest agricul- 
tural cities on earth. Yet its only " hotels " are dirty little Indian 
eating-houses without sleeping accommodations, and the traveler must 
fall back on the prehistoric system of hunting up a friend's friend. 
For once this round-about method brought handsome results; at the 
home of the Montesinos brothers I found my most home-like accom- 
modations south of Quito, in a highly cultured family with no scent 
of the public hostelry about it. My front door opened on a vista 
across the patio and the long market plaza, usually shimmering with 
Indians and clashing colors, to the blue hills and a strip of Dresden- 
china sky to the west ; and it is only fair to the Andes to mention that 
this extraordinary family had erected in a back patio a well-appointed 
lavatory, stoutly padlocked against the Indians of the hoiisehold. 

The Montesinos brothers, sons of a former governor of the Province 
of Azuay, were lawyers, as well as professors in Cuenca's colegio, 
leaders in the intellectual life of the city, excellent examples of the 
best grade of " interandino." One was a teacher of French and Eng- 
lish, which did not seriously mean that he could speak either of those 
tongues. In 1899 this bookish, somewhat effeminate man had started 
a revolution against the Alfaro government in the person of General 

190 



THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR 

Franco, a blood-thirsty half-negro from Esmeraldas, who had been 
made governor of Azuay. It proved unsuccessful, and the instigator 
had been forced to fly to the jungled Oriente and live for months 
among the head-hunting Jivaros Indians. I had hesitated to believe 
my own convictions on certain conditions in Ecuador, but this frank 
and outspoken native outdid anything I might have said. His attitude 
was in striking contrast to that belligerent " pride " of Latin-American 
governments and their led mobs and self-seeking politicians. To him 
the thrice-beloved " patriotism " of his hot-tempered fellows was rub- 
bish. What he wanted was an efficient government and a chance to 
live a free life, whether he remained a subject of the particular strip of 
territory known as Ecuador, or of the gigantic " Yanqui-land " so 
many seemed to fancy imminent. He asserted that the police of 
Cuenca were its worst criminals ; all thieves and ruffians who could 
not be openly convicted were sentenced to serve as policemen. Except 
in the collecting of taxes and as a place of reward for its henchmen, 
the central government leaves Cuenca and the south of Ecuador 
virtually abandoned, and that tendency, so general in Latin-American 
countries, for the more distant parts to break away and form a free, 
or at least autonomous state is here marked. The region labors under 
a thousand petty annoyances. For instance, Quito has a parcel-post 
service with the outside world, but Cuenca has none, nor any money- 
order system, and about one piece of mail in three ever reaches an 
addressee in the capital of the Azuay. A package mailed from abroad 
to a cuencano lies in Guayaquil until the addressee appears in person, 
or appoints a lawyer, to lay claim to it, to pay the fees and grease 
the wheels of the legal and illegal formalities necessary to set it on 
its way to its destination. 

To our modern notions Cuenca is not much of a city; yet here in 
the almost untracked wilderness it seemed enormous. So rarely do 
strangers visit it that, large as it is and in spite of my entirely con- 
ventional appearance, I could barely pause in the street without all 
work in the vicinity ceasing and a crowd gathering about me. Hungry 
to behold a new face as the crew of a windjammer that has gazed 
only upon themselves during long months at sea, their attitude seemed 
to say, " We can work to-morrow, but there is no certainty that we 
can have the pleasure of looking at a stranger." It is hard for Amer- 
icans, with their wide outlook and accustomed to the complicated 
existence of our large cities, to realize the narrowness of life in these 
placid old adobe towns hidden away in the Andes. Virtually cut off 

191 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

from the outside world, the cuencanos are a peculiarly bookish people. 
" We do not know," said Montesinos, " that there are places on the 
globe where men live in freedom and decency, except from books." 
Yet in spite of being rather uncertain of their dignity, like all isolated 
peoples, the educated classes were as well-meaning, as simpdticos, as 
any I met in Latin-America. Two things only were necessary to join 
the upper caste, — a white collar and visiting-cards. The former above 
a patched " hand-me-down " was more effective than a new $100 suit 
worn with a flannel shirt; and the man who has his name printed on 
bits of cardboard, to exchange with regal courtesy and profound bows 
with every upper-class acquaintance, is instantly accepted as of gente 
decente origin. Indeed, visiting cards should be as fixed a part of 
every Andean traveler's equipment as heavy boots. 

One could not but pity these ineffectually ambitious mortals, kept 
down by leaden environment and isolation. He who does not deal 
in " panama " hats has hardly an opening in Cuenca, except to study 
medicine, law, or theology in the local colegio ; hence there is a 
plethora of " doctors " who can only wear their titles and live the life 
of enforced bookworms, forbidden by the rigid rules of caste even the 
privilege of turning their hands to some useful occupation. As in 
Bogota, the very isolation and lack of opportunity has driven many 
to their studies, and Cuenca numbers many writers among her " sons," 
producers chiefly of that languid, half-melancholy, pretty poetry, full 
of the " fine writing " the divorce from life and unlimited leisure to 
polish their gems of thought gives. In all Cuenca there is only one 
mean little bookshop, selling religious tracts and translations of 
American and English " penny dreadfuls." The intelectaales can only, 
as it were, feed upon each other and form mutual admiration societies, 
where admiration soon palls from too constant familiarity and lack of 
new blood. Few, even of the " best families," have ever been out of 
the cuenca, or basin, in which the city lies, and its isolation has given 
the place something of the atmosphere the traveler is always seeking — 
commonly in vain — of a world wholly removed from outside in- 
fluence. 

Their ineffective eagerness to learn was pathetic. The most nearly 
educated young men of the town had rented a second-story hall near 
the main plaza and decorated its facade with huge letters announcing 
it the " English Language Club." Here the score or so of more or 
less English-speaking residents of the male sex gathered together 
several evenings a week. 

192 




The "English Language Club" of Cuenca in full session 




An hacienda-house of southern Ecuador, backed by its grove of eucalyptus-trees. The 
owner or the mayordomo occupies the two-story structure, while the rest of the house- 
hold string out in regular caste gradations to the kitchen and outhouses 



THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR 

For years, however, there had not been a genuine English-speak- 
ing person living permanently anywhere near Cuenca. In their eager- 
ness to capture an authority the club drafted me at once, and whole 
delegations were always ready to go about and show me the town and 
vicinity — provided it was a not too distant vicinity, for they had as 
great a dread as the quiteho of getting far from the central plaza. I 
was received kindly and eagerly by the educated men anywhere, so 
long as it did not involve my intrusion on the Moorish seclusion of 
their family life, and became a sort of honored guest of the town, 
even if I was not presented with the key to it, which by comparison 
with the door-keys would have been a burden indeed. They were not 
" spenders " ; money comes slowly and with too great a strain in these 
parts, but they were ever on the lookout to do me little kindnesses. 

Barely was I settled, therefore, when I was hurried off to an evening 
at the " English Language Club," convoked in special session. For 
an hour I sat like the chief buffoon in a comic-opera ensemble in the 
center of a horseshoe circle that included a score of doctors — 
Cuenca swarms with doctors, home-made and book-trained — the 
grandsons of presidents, sons of ministers to Washington and the 
court of St. James, while the whole gathering, like self-conscious 
school-boys, got off a sentence or two in more or less English in 
regular rotation around the circle, until some shining genius sug- 
gested that, as they had so illustrious a guest with them, it was 
merely a " social evening " and not a regular meeting ; hence the rule 
demanding that only English be spoken was not in force. With a 
veritable explosion of relief the entire club burst into Spanish, and 
Alfonzo was himself again. 

Later experience proved that the rule was largely a dead-letter even 
at regular meetings, and only to be enforced when the arrival of an 
illustrious stranger put the club on parade. The walls were hung 
with several mottoes in English, and they had gathered together some 
belated American magazines and a billiard table. There the members 
gathered several evenings a week to play " pocar," and to practice 
very intermittently such English as they had learned from the printed 
page, forming their sentences and — what was worse — their pronun- 
ciation from the rules books had to offer, and mixing in with it a bit 
of a similar brand of French, as if any foreign language answered more 
or less the purposes of the club. The rules forbade the use within 
the club-room of any tongue than our own, but after the first few set 
greetings of " goot nig-ht, how do yo do ? " the gathering settled down 

193 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

to an uproar of Castilian, broken only by the few phrases of Cuenca- 
English which custom had stereotyped. The majority came to play 
" pocar," not so much because of the opportunities that pastime offered 
for one of the Latin- American's chief failings — for pockets were 
seldom bulging — but because it smacked of the United States, the 
stepmother of the " English Language Club " of Cuenca. The 
son of a former Ecuadorian minister to Washington, who had spent 
a year or two in " Yanqui-land," shared with " el Sefior Doctor Mon- 
tesinos, profesor de ingles en nuestro colegio," the position of final 
authority on the tongue, except on those rare occasions when a traveler 
brought the real, dyed-in-the-wool article with him. Even the au- 
thorities were not faultless. They said " dissiples " for pupils, used 
habitually the expression " I can to go," and clung tenaciously to 
similar choice bits of their own convictions, and, what was worse, 
drilled them into their fellow-members with that dogmatism strongest 
in those who are wrong. But the minister's son had made the most 
of his American residence in learning " pocar " so thoroughly that he 
was as real an authority on that art as he fancied himself in English. 
Unfortunately, the combined efforts of the club had not unearthed 
among all the dog-eared classics that had drifted together in genera- 
tions of Cuenca's flirting with English the mention in print of 
that fascinating pastime. Whence they had been forced to adopt 
their own spelling and home-made phrases. On the wall appeared a 
warning placard, " Those which play pocar are speaking English," 
and each game was sprinkled with a rapid-fire of Spanish, punctuated 
by fixed phrases of near-English. Thus the expressions " You bid," 
or " You open," had been concocted by the simple means of literal 
translation from the Castilian used in similar pastimes, and became 
" You speak." Amid the crack of billiard-balls and the rattling of 
home-made chips the conversation ran on much as follows: 

" Cordero, you are serveeng. Y hombre, ya le dije que la much- 
acha no . . ." 

" Fife cards ; all ze workeengs, Carlos." 

" Lindisima, hombre, pero su mama. . . . Enriquito, you speak." 

" No, senor, equivocado, I am speakeeng." 

" Caramba ! Es verdad. Eet ees true. And for how much are 
you speakeeng?" 

" No, et ees meestake. Ze doctor is speakeeng, because he is sitteeng 
by ze side of Juancito, which ees serveeng ze cards," — and with 
deep solemnity the doctor proceeded to " speak " by throwing two 

194 



THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR 

Cuenca-made chips on the table, the game rattling on until Mufioz 
broke in upon an oratorical description of the latest event of the vida 
social of Cuenca with a : 

" And I am nameeng you now, Carlitos ; with ze house full of ze 
whole kettle," and throwing down a " full house," he scraped the 
entire pile of chips to his corner of the table. 

There were two dentists in Cuenca at the time of my visit. One 
of those present was not there in person, because he had gone away on 
a week's journey two months before ; the other had not yet arrived, 
though he appeared nightly at the " English Language Club," because 
his instruments of torture and gold-plated diploma were still some- 
where on the road from Guayaquil. Had they both been unqualifiedly 
present in the flesh, the wise man would have continued to endure 
any degree of toothache rather than submit to their amateurish 
mercies. The chief raison d'etre of the city is its commerce in 
" panama " hats, though virtually none are made there. The agent 
sent to Azogues or other neighboring towns pencils in some cabalistic 
code on the inside of the hat the price paid the weaver — or as near 
that price as his conscience makes necessary — and delivers it to his 
employer. In the city are many " factories of sombreros," from be- 
hind the down-cast mud fronts of which sounds all day long the 
pounding of wooden mallets, and from which exudes the constant 
smell of sulphur. At the establishment of a club-member we posed 
for a local photographer in acres of hats, in various stages of the 
finishing process, which ranged from the huge Gualaquiza products 
from the Jivaros country on the east, to those of so fine a weave as 
to be inferior only to the famous jipijapa of Manabi. 

It is just over the range from Cuenca that are to be found the 
Jivaros, the widely renowned head-hunters of the upper Amazon. 
Montesinos had lived long months among them at the time of his mis- 
hap, and knew their ways well. A proud, untamed race engaged in 
almost constant warfare with the neighboring tribes, they consider the 
white man an equal, and treat him as a friend so long as he does not 
transgress their strict tribal laws. The Andean Indian, with his slink- 
ing air and his heavy clothing, they look down upon as a weakling and 
a very inferior being. Having despatched an enemy, the Jivaros cut 
off the head well down on the shoulders, extract the skull by a vertical 
cut at the back, sew up this and the lips, and, by the insertion of hot 
stones and a process only imperfectly understood by any other than the 
tribe itself, reduce the head to the size of an orange, with the original 

195 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

features easily recognizable. In this state it is said to be of little use 
to its rightful owner, even if recovered. The desiccated head must, 
according to tribal laws, be kept until after the yearly ceremony to ap- 
pease the spirit of the dead man, after which it is hung up as a trophy 
over the entrance to the successful hunter's house, or, what is far 
more usual of late years, traded to some passing white man for a rifle 
or a supply of cartridges. One traveler I met had been so eager to 
obtain one of the dried heads that he offered a Jivaro chief two rifles. 
The chief replied sadly that, though he would do anything possible to 
get a rifle, unfortunately it happened that the tribe did not have a 
single dried head on hand. " But," he cried a moment later, his 
countenance brightening visibly, " could you wait a month or so ? " 

A few years ago a tall, lanky German arrived in Cuenca and went 
down among the Jivaros to study their customs, and especially to find 
out exactly how they shrink heads. Month after month passed with- 
out a word from him, but cuencanos knew the Teuton way of pur- 
suing an investigation step by step in all its details and ramifications, 
and thought nothing of the prolonged absence. Then one day, more 
than a year later, there was offered for sale in the market of Cuenca 
a splendid specimen of shrunken head, with long, blond hair and beard 
and a scholarly cast of countenance. The investigation had been 
thorough ; but the outside world still remains in darkness on the art 
of shrinking heads among the Jivaros. 

To the stranger, perhaps the feature of Cuenca that will remain 
longest in his memory is her street lights ; certainly, if it happens to be 
his lot to have to find his way home on a black night after a sad, candle- 
lighted " comedy " in the local theater — the school-room of the 
colegio. The laws of Cuenca require that every resident in the prin- 
cipal streets set up a candle before his house. But as the two-cent 
velas which are satisfactory to the law are short and not particularly 
inflammable, and the wind is given to blowing its hardest during the 
first hour after dusk, the city changes long before eight from long, 
faintly-guessed lanes between unseen house-walls to a medieval inky 
blackness. The inhabitant who stirs abroad carries a square glass 
box containing a flickering candle, or is accompanied by a " link- 
boy," in true medieval fashion. The stranger who, being no smoker, 
chances not even to have matches with him, feels his way homeward 
for an uncertain number of blocks by counting them with his fingers, 
at last discovering the plaza on which he lives by hugging the corner 
of it. Shivering with uncertainty as to whether his lodging is the 

196 



THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR 

third or the fourth door from the butchershop with the protruding 
hook, here and there stumbling over a piece of sidewalk or into a 
puddle, he finally coaxes his gigantic key to fit its lock with some- 
thing far more potent than satisfaction. 

Thus life runs its placid course in this far-off city of the Andes. 
Those who come there after the railway from Huigra reaches Cuenca, 
if long-pondered plans some day mature, will no doubt find it different, 
more blase and less likable, no longer one of the rewards of toiling 
over the world's byways. Even electric lights are threatened, and be- 
fore them will flee one of its most nearly unique characteristics. 

The hope of securing an ass to stagger out of Cuenca under my 
possessions had melted day by day during my week there. In what 
I had been assured was the best donkey-market in Ecuador, those 
animals proved both scarce and high in price. Toward the end of 
my stay the baggage I had sent from Huigra had arrived, both de- 
veloping tank and tray broken, in spite of the vociferous promises of 
the fletero, though still serviceable with elaborate manipulation. It 
was chiefly picture^taking that forced me to turn pack-horse; had I 
been able to abandon everything connected with photography, I might 
have pranced along like a school-boy under his knowledge. A pack 
of nearly fifty pounds remained, in spite of a rigid reduction and a 
desperate throwing away which included even my medicine case, be- 
queathed to Montesinos, for ever since crossing the Rio Grande into 
Mexico seventeen months before I had been burdened with it, without 
a single excuse to swallow one of its myriad pills. If only Edison 
would take a day off to invent a baggage on legs that would trot, dog- 
fashion, after its owner — just a modest little baggage of, say, fifty 
pounds — it would revolutionize life. 

Distinguished visitors to the cities of the Andes are, in all accounts 
extant, met upon their arrival and sent on their way by a cavalcade of 
horsemen including all the local celebrities. For the first time in my 
Latin- American journey I was accompanied by a guard of honor as 
I plodded heavily out of Cuenca on March tenth ; that is, Montesinos, 
the master of " English," strolled with me across the ancient cobbled 
bridge over the Matadero and a mile or more beyond, until he met the 
sun coming up from the jungled montana of the Jivaros and turned 
back with the market-bound Indians to his scholastic duties. The 
broad highway was dry and hard as a floor. Prepared in my heavy 
boots for the usual Andean trail, I could have walked it in dancing- 
pumps. The great cuenca shrunk to an ever-narrower, fertile valley, 

197 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

stretching southward along a little stream called the Tarqui. A score 
of Indians were plowing a single field with ox-drawn plows fashioned 
from forest trees. So scant is his individual initiative that the 
Andean husbandman works well only in company with his fellows, 
and the experienced mayordomo conducts his farming in a succession 
of " bees " in which all the employees join efforts, as in the days of 
the Inca. 

The Andes grow higher and more mountainous to the south. Be- 
yond the hacienda and the hamlet of Cumbe next morning, the valley 
closed in and forced the highway to scale, like an escaping prisoner 
his walls, the great Andean " Knot " of Portete. Bit by bit it shrunk 
to a narrow road, then to a rocky trail, like a man about to begin some 
mighty task, with no longer time to consider his personal appearance, 
reducing himself to the bare essentials. Through clumps of black- 
berries and frost-bitten corn it climbed, then shook off even these, and 
split into faint, diverging paths across another of those lofty, wind- 
swept, solitary paramos of the Andes, broken here and there, only 
scantily covered with the dreary dead-brown ichu bunch-grass of the 
highlands, and low, bushy achupallas. 

It would have been more to the point if the sympathy the old woman 
of the hacienda behind had taken the form of fiambre, a roadster's 
lunch, with which to follow up the coffee and diaphanous roll of an 
Ecuadorian desayuno. By ten I was starving. By eleven I had eaten 
even the rose I wore in a button-hole; during the next few hours I 
found three blackberries, hard and green, and shook dice with sudden 
death by eating a handful of a wholly unknown and even more taste- 
less paramo berry. The one Indian I met during the afternoon mis- 
informed me, before he sped on out of reach, that Nabon was a bare 
two leagues beyond; and all the rest of the day my imagination per- 
sisted in heaping up mighty banquets that toppled over and faded 
away as I prepared to fall upon them. 

Suddenly the paramo ended as if it had been hacked off with a dull 
gigantic machete, and the way-worn, haggard trail stumbled blindly 
down into a labyrinthian chaos of jagged white rocks, like an arctic 
sea in upheaval, an earthquake section as split and smashed and broken 
as if the world had come into collision at this point with another 
planet or a celestial lamp-post. When at last I sighted Nabon, long 
after I had entered it a score of times in imagination, it was still a 
mere speck on a broken edge of the earth's crust which I reached by 
dusk only by dint of a herculean struggle. 

198 



THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR 

It was a cornfield town of thatched mud huts, of universally Indian 
blood. The alcalde was not at home, but the priest's word was law, 
and I was soon dropping my bundle from my grateful shoulders in 
the " best room " of an Indian dwelling. My unwilling host removed 
the bedclothes and piled them on the uneven earth floor in an ad- 
joining room, for himself, wife and child, and left me the wooden- 
floored bedstead. The mud walls were embellished not merely with 
the gaudy colored chromos of various " Virgins," but with scores of 
the advertising pages of American magazines, chiefly pictorial, for the 
family could not even read its own tongue. I did not succeed in dis- 
covering how these exotic reminders of home had found their way to 
this unknown village of the Andes. The Indian and his wife kept 
me awake half the night with their alternating prayers and responses 
before a candle-lighted lithograph in the adjoining room, each prayer 
beginning, " Blessed Santa Maria, give us this ; Blessed Santa Maria, 
give us that." One would have thought Maria ran a department 
store. 

It is only eighteen miles from Nabon to Ona, but no mere words 
can give any suggestion of the labyrinthian toil that lies between 
them. Down in the bottom of the mightiest chasm of this tortured 
section of the earth sits an isolated peak shaped like an angular hay- 
cock. From the lowest point of the day's tramp I could not see its 
summit; when I looked back hours later upon the immense stretch of 
gashed and tumbled world behind me, the peak had sunk to a mere dot 
on the landscape. Yet in a way it was an ideal tramp. A sun-flooded 
day in the exhilarating mountain air passed in absolute silence without 
even the sight of a fellow mortal, except very rarely a lone shepherd 
so far away on a bare brown mountainside as to be merely a tiny 
detail of the scenery. There was one drawback, also; for the spider- 
leg trails split and spread at random across the world above at every 
opportunity, and for several hours at a time I was not at all certain I 
was going to Peru. 

At length I rounded a lofty spur, and another great valley opened 
out before me. An hour later I prepared to present my note to the 
cura of Ona. His two housekeepers, attractive chola girls, received 
me with the customary coldness of their class toward strangers, and 
the information that the padre " had gone to the mountain." " Ya no 
mas de venir — he should be back at any moment " — murmured one 
of them; which might mean, of course, that he would be back in an 
hour or a week. There was no one else in this shelf-like hillside of 

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VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

mud huts around a dead plaza surrounded by cornfields who would be 
likely to house me, and I could only wait hi hungry patience. Night 
was falling like a quick curtain at the end of a dismal act, when one of 
the stupid damsels admitted " probably he will not be back to-night," 
but that they would serve " a little something to eat," if I could wait 
awhile. I was already accustomed to that occupation. On a work- 
table of the earth-floored and walled corredor, among the parrots that 
kept calling the cholas by name, a chained monkey of homicidal 
tendencies, and other cural odds and ends, a meal of several courses 
was at length set before me as rapidly as the single tin plate could be 
washed and refilled. Ofia does not eat bread, but so large a helping 
of mote was served that I succeeded in filling a coat pocket with it, 
well knowing that no other provisions would be forthcoming for the 
morrow's uninhabited trail. As a food, this mess of boiled kernels of 
ripe corn, chief sustenance of the Andean Indian on his travels, is 
like those medicines that are worse than the ailment they are designed 
to cure. Then there was a plate of black beans, a corn tamale, and a 
tasteless preserved fruit, all stone-cold, but red-hot with the aji, or 
green peppers, with which all food in the Andes is enlivened. 

Hours later a group of horsemen rode up out of the night and 
halted before the casa cural. I rose from a cramped doze on a cor- 
redor bench to find the priest dismounting. A brawny man of massive 
frame, more than six feet tall, with well-cut features and a powerful 
Roman nose, dressed in a black robe reaching to his spurs, and a huge 
" panama " hat of exceedingly fine weave — a present, no doubt, from 
some fond member of his flock among the surrounding hills — he 
towered far above his companions. A cigarette smouldered between 
his lips, a week's growth of dense black beard half-covered a face that 
bore testimony to long and deep experience in worldly matters, and his 
voice boomed like Quito's largest church-bell. Yet his manner was 
that syrupy courtesy, accompanied by a whining speech, peculiar to the 
region. He fawned upon all who approached him, addressing them 
with maudlin words of endearment, — " Ah, compadrecito ! " " Oh, 
my dearest of friends ! " " Oh, Josecito cholito, hijito mio ! " — with a 
long-drawn, rising and falling inflection that made his speech seem even 
more false and insincere than it was in reality. Me he greeted in the 
same tone, like a long-lost " amiguito," and assured me the casa cural 
was henceforth my personal property, expressing his deepest regret 
that he had just sent to Cuenca, where he was about to be transferred, 
his two phonographs and " diez mil pesos " ($5000 worth) of other 

200 



en U 
£. O 



^ a 



^ ni 




THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR 

toys. It was a typical cural residence of the Andes. The rough 
adobe walls of his cluttered study, with mud benches in the form of 
divans around them, were almost completely covered with large litho- 
graphs advertising various brands of whiskey and cigarettes, more 
than half of them showing nude female figures. Under his table was 
spread out to dry a six-foot square patch of tobacco, and at frequent 
intervals the padre reached under it for the " makings " of a cigarette, 
without taking his eyes off his visitors nor ceasing the flow of his 
cadenced endearments. 

Two men, chiefly of Indian blood, soon joined us, one the jefe 
politico, and the other what might be called in English chairman of the 
town council. The former carried a guitar, the latter a quart bottle of 
aguardiente, and both a stimulated gaiety even greater than that of the 
priest. During an affectionate three hours the trio toasted each other 
alternately in large glasses of this double-voltage concoction, after 
suffering two or three rounds of which I was forced to allege a sore 
throat. The moving spirit of the feast was the priest, whose powerful 
frame carried his liquor well, and the evening raged on amid a riot of 
chatter and the savage thrumming of the guitar, little more than the 
flushed faces visible in the dense-clouded atmosphere of cigarette 
smoke within the tightly closed room. The cura spoke French readily, 
having been in earlier years an inmate of the French monastery of 
Riobamba, and affected it with me all the evening. The jefe politico 
was childishly eager to hear us speak that strange tongue; the town 
councilor roared with anger as often as either of us uttered a word 
of it, charging that we were abusing him under cover of " that cursed 
Castijian of the gringos." The cura maliciously added fuel to his 
wrath, unostentatiously keeping the bottle moving meanwhile, sending 
a boy to replenish it as often as it was emptied. The enraged coun- 
cilor ended at last by staggering out into the night and across the plaza, 
shouting drunkenly that he was going for a gun or a machete. The 
other two followed him, and for some time a maudlin bellowing, inter- 
mingled with the wheedling of a velvety voice of rising and falling 
cadence, awoke the echoes of the night, gradually subsiding until at 
length silence fell. The priest at last came slowly back without 
a suggestion of intoxication, which he seemed to lay aside as he might 
his long black robe, reached under the table, rolled a cigarette, and 
explained apologetically that, as, his recent companions were the chief 
civil authorities, he must keep on good terms with them " whatever 
his own tastes and desires." Then he implored me to spend the fol- 

201 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

lowing day in Ofia, promising that we should visit on muleback the 
many historical spots in the vicinity, and launching into a learned dis- 
sertation on the history of the region. Ofia, he asserted, was the 
oldest town in Southern Ecuador, and the treaty of peace had been 
signed by Sucre in this very house after the battle of Tarqui. In 
spite of the impression that the invitation was mere surface courtesy, 
I finally promised to remain. He threw his arms about me in an 
affectionate abrazo, showering upon me endearing terms, all ending 
in the Spanish diminutive ito, and called upon the housekeepers to 
spread a mattress for me on a mud divan in the study. Then the 
cura, who at least had the virtue of living his life frankly, retired with 
the two comely cholas to an adjoining room in which, it is true, 
there were two beds, and silence settled down over the Andes. 

In the morning I turned over for another nap. An hour later the 
priest and his unofficial family marched in upon me, and it was some 
time before I could get sufficient privacy and liquid mud to shave 
and dress. From that hour until night I had little more than silent 
suffrance from the cura and his household, and heard not a reference 
to those " many points of historical importance " he had painted in 
such enticing terms in his ardent condition of the night before. Tomas 
a Kempis says : " A sad morning often follows a merry evening," or 
words to that effect, but the cura of Ofia had evidently overlooked that 
particular quotation. An almost constant stream of Indians and half- 
Indians came to inquire in soft cadenced voices for " tayta curita," who 
sat in his fly-swarming den smoking countless cigarettes and whining 
unlimited endearments and blessings on all comers, but resolutely 
squelching all applications for coin of the realm or the material things 
of this world, and reaching at frequent intervals for the replenished 
quart bottle. About eleven the two of us, and a " carpenter " who 
had been pottering about the house all the morning fitting together 
two boards that were destined never to fit, sat down in a corner of 
the wide back corredor of the casa cural to a substantial dinner at 
which cat, dog, parrot, and monkey helped themselves to every dish 
as freely as we. The meal was adorned with a jar of pulque, a drink 
which the cura had taught his cholas to make after reading of it in 
an account of Mexico. The rest of the day drowsed slothfully away 
amid the screaming of parrots, the barking of dogs, the shrieks of the 
monkey rattling his chain in all but successful attempts to rend and 
tear some unwary visitor, and a swarming of flies that sounded like a 
distant waterfall, — a typical parish-priest life of rural Ecuador, 

202 



THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR 

punctuated by the occasional chanting of the velvety, singsong voice in 
the mud church next door, as my host hurried through a mass for 
'some departed soul. Toward sunset the household was augmented by 
a third plump and youthful chola who had been home on a visit to her 
parental mud hut among the hills. It seemed strange that the casa 
cural was so ill-kept and slatternly with so generous a supply of house- 
keepers. 

At the summit beyond the chaotic chasm into which the world falls 
away below Ona, the nature of the country changed. From an endless 
vista of barren and often soilless rocks, the entire landscape was trans- 
formed to a heavily wooded region of hardy undergrowth, somewhat 
like small, bushy oaks, at times almost approaching a forest, a shaggy 
world rolling away as far as the eye could follow in every direction. 
Here and there was a larger bush completely covered with pink blos- 
soms. Then the half-forested mountaintop took gradually to rocking, 
like a ship approaching a tempestuous sea, until all at once it spilled 
itself, like the cargo of an overturned freighter, into another enormous 
hole in the earth, hazy with the very depths of it. The trail pitched 
over the edge with the rest, like a bit of flotsam from a wreck, help- 
lessly at the mercy of the waves. Thousands of little green farms, 
chiefly of corn, with an Indian hut set in a corner of each, hung at 
sharp angles about the enclosing walls of the valley. I had reached the 
famous Vale of Zaraguro, the Land of Corn, — zara is Quichua for 
maize — to climb at last into the scattered grass-grown village itself. 

Ensconced in the great hoyo of Jubones, dividing the Azuay from the 
province of Loja, Zaraguro is a little world of its own. The great 
majority of its population is Indian, but a new type of Indian, of 
darker skin and more independent manner than those to the north, still 
humble to the gente decente when facing them singly, but verging on 
insolence when gathered in groups with chicha at hand. Here each 
owns a little patch of land and refuses serfdom. His dress is somber, 
in marked contrast to. the gaudy colors of his quitefio cousin. In 
place of the loose white panties, he clothes his legs to the knee with a 
close-fitting coffee-hued woolen garment, and covers all the rest of 
the body with a poncho of the same color. He wears an immensely 
thick, almost white, felt hat of box-shaped crown, the brim drooping 
about his face, and his long, jet-black hair, instead of being confined 
in a tape-wound braid, is commonly flying about his head and 
shoulders. He buys nothing from the outside world — except masses 
and indulgences — shears his own sheep, the wool of which, usually 

203 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

black, his women spin and weave into the heavy cloth that provides 
the somber garments of both sexes. Besides supplying its own wants, 
the valley of Zaraguro exports by way of Puerto Bolivar a bit of 
coarse cascarilla bark, basis of quinine, at about five cents a pound. 

Zaraguro assured me that the road to Loja was " todo piano " ; but 
level has strange meanings to a people accustomed from birth to the 
steepest of mountains. One of the best engineered highways in Ecua- 
dor looped ever higher to the " realms of eternal silence " of the 
Acayana-Guagra-uma "Knot," but from the dense-forested summit, 
where I had looked forward to the corresponding pleasure of looping 
as leisurely down the opposite flank, an atrocious trail stumbled head- 
long downward to the narrow valley of a small river. From the 
hamlet of San Lucas a long day, pouring incessantly with rain, fol- 
lowed the stream, the trail mounting and descending rocky headlands 
with the monotonous regularity of a flat carwheel. Even where the 
landscape opened out again at last, the plain was calf-deed in mud, 
and it was only by dint of a constant struggle that I dragged myself, 
mud-caked and drenched, on the second evening into the southernmost 
city of Ecuador. 

Loja, 380 miles from Quito and capital of the province least in 
touch with the central government, lies exactly on the fourth parallel 
south, in the delta of the little Zamora and Malacatos rivers, insignifi- 
cant bits of the Amazon system. It is a low, flat, rather featureless 
town, surrounded by a fertile, fruit-producing soil, and though 7000 
feet above sea-level, of a humid, semi-tropical climate that is kindly 
even to bananas. Birds, among them one much like the robin, make 
the place reminiscent of American summers. There are only rolling 
hills near at hand, though not far off is that " labyrinth of mountains " 
of Prescott's fancy, blue-black now with the rainy season, high up 
among which, according to local assertion, are still to be found rem- 
nants of the great military highway of the Incas. Lojanos seemed a 
dull, torpid people, laborious of mind, and the town has little of the pic- 
turesque, even in costume. The pure Castilian type is well represented, 
but Indian blood, chiefly in the meztizo form, is still supreme, though 
by no means so general as to the north, and the population includes a 
few negroes and more sambos, — mixtures of Indian and African 
blood. More than eighty lawyers hover in their mud dens, ready to 
pick the bones of the 8000 inhabitants, largely poverty-stricken illiter- 
ates. There is some weaving of " panama " hats, and in an attempt 
to stimulate that industry " profesores " of the art have been imported 

204 



THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR 

from the Azuay to teach it, particularly in the orphan asylums. But 
it remains at best a dilettante occupation, foreign to the soil. The chief 
industry of the region round about is the raising of mules and 
cattle that are shipped chiefly to Peru. Lima subsists largely on Loja 
meat, which is, no doubt, the reason she gets virtually none herself, 
even when it is not some Catholic day sacred to starvation. Zaruma 
and Portovelo, two muleback days to the west, boast the chief Ameri- 
can mines of Ecuador, but gringos are seldom seen in her streets. 

In one matter the town is in advance of more populous Cuenca, — it 
has electric lights. As long ago as 1897 Loja brought in, by way of 
Peru, the first dynamo known to Ecuador, a sign of " progreso " of 
which her inhabitants never tire of boasting. Scattered in sixteen- 
candle-power bulbs here and there along the streets, the system did 
not reach as high as the littered lumber-room in which I spent the 
nights on a platform on legs, where the customary candle winked 
weakly through the humid darkness. I was overjoyed, however, to 
come upon a placard announcing that the municipal library was open to 
the public even at night ! As it promised to open first at one of the 
afternoon, I was not surprised to find it still locked when I arrived at 
two. I waited a half hour, peering greedily through the bars of the 
reja at the long shelves of books and maps. Then I began inquiries. 
The adjoining shopkeeper expressed unbounded surprise that there 
were persons so ignorant as not to know " the government is so poor it 
cannot pay the librarian any more," and that the institution had been 
closed for months. 

Loja was once the center of the commerce in cascarilla, the bark of a 
tree not unlike the cherry in appearance, that abounds in the ravines 
of the mountains to the eastward of the city. Nearly three centuries 
ago a missionary to the region found the Indians grinding the bitter 
bark in their stone mortars and swallowing it as a specific against in- 
termittent fevers, as they do to this day. When the wife of the Conde 
de Chinchon, viceroy of Peru, lay ill of a fever in Lima, the corregidor 
of Loja sent to her physician a parcel of the powdered bark. Upon 
her return to Europe the condesa carried a quantity of the magic 
powder with her, whence it was for a long time known as chinchona. 
Meanwhile Jusuit missionaries of Brazil had sent parcels of it to 
Rome, whence it was distributed among the brotherhood, nothing 
loathe to add to their reputation for miraculous powers and to the in- 
come from their drug-stores, and the name " Jesuits' bark " became 
widespread. The tree, however, has always been known to the In- 

205 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

dians by the Quichua name of " quina-quina," and in time the refined 
product took on its modern name of quinine. The tree in its original 
habitat has been ruthlessly treated, being often felled merely to avoid 
the labor of barking it standing, and to-day, with large chinchona 
plantations in India, southern Ecuador has but a fraction of the income 
it might have from one of its most valuable indigenous products. It 
is typical of Latin-American conditions that a capsule — or more com- 
monly an oblea, like two saucers stuck together — of quinine, reim- 
ported from Europe and paying heavy custom duties, costs four times 
as much in the boticas of Loja as in the United States. 

In one of the quaint two-story houses with an air of decayed gen- 
tility, facing the main plaza and grazing ground of Loja, lives Augustin 
Carrion, inventor of the " celifono," by means of which a piano can 
be played by electricity and given the soft, long-drawn notes of an 
organ. He is the chief " sight " of the region, yet held in a certain 
ill-concealed disdain by the mass of his fellow-townsmen, even while 
they are basking in the sunshine of his fame; a striking example of 
those rare mortals who struggle to raise themselves above the low 
level of their deadening environment in these buried cities far from 
the moving modern world. 

I found him in his rambling parlor, of undusted efforts at grandeur, 
its walls decorated with large maps of Paris and New York, both of 
which he had once visited in an effort to patent and place his invention, 
interspersed with the customary inartistic family portraits draped with 
aged mourning crepe. A member of one of Loja's chief families, of 
pure Spanish blood, speaking a cultured Castilian with the diction of 
a man of books, he was in appearance a ludicrous mixture of the 
typical inventor of the comic supplements and of the Latin-American 
stickler for formal dress. Scraggly gray whiskers pursued themselves 
about his unimpressive face ; a haircut months overdue emphasized his 
narrow shoulders and flat chest. His hands, thin almost to trans- 
parency, suggested something weak and harmless in need of protection. 
His once stiff white shirt was innocent of buttons, and with his ener- 
getic, or, more exactly, nervous movements, frequently opened to 
disclose a flacid skin and a Catholic charm hanging low about his neck. 
A collar, buttoned only at one end, was adorned with a cravat that was 
not a cravat, but only a strip of black ribbon that floated here and there 
about his throat. His frock-coat, sine qua non of Latin-American 
respectability, was gray with dust, trousers unacquainted with the 
pressing-board were spotted with the mementoes of laboratory ac- 

206 



THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR 

cidents, and the slender aristocratic shoes, possessing in common three 
buttons, had been worn completely heelless. Here, in the bosom of 
his disdainful family, he wore a greasy old cap ; later in the day I met 
him promenading under the portales of the plaza in the same costume, 
but for the added glory of a " stove-pipe " hat of at least twenty years 
of harried existence. 

His taller, or workshop, overlooking the main square, was a chaos 
of odds and ends gathered by a man who had given his life chiefly to 
the study of physics, and who was alternately tinkering at a score of in- 
ventions. In the absence of a real source of supply his apparatus was 
almost entirely home-made, or, as he himself put it, " Loja-made," a 
collection fashioned from cigar boxes, string, tin cans, and whatever 
makeshifts fell in his way, resembling nothing so much as the play- 
things of some isolated but inventive farmer's boy. A shoemaker's 
needle, on the plan of a sewing-machine shuttle, that was designed to 
revolutionize the making of footwear, had been constructed from the 
shell of a rifle cartridge. Of as plebeian materials he had built a little 
transparent box to place above the needle of a phonograph, to do away 
with the metallic sound of that instrument — but in Latin- American 
fashion his phonograph was out of order and did not " function." 
Another crude apparatus he pointed out as a proof that " a sphere can 
revolve on two axes at once," — a ball of yarn representing the earth 
was twirled by a tiny dynamo, and at the same time given a rotary mo- 
tion by a string belt — and so on through all the realms of physics, 
which he taught here in his taller several times a week to the boys of 
the local colegio. The Loja-made original of his most important in- 
vention was out of order, and I was not favored with a test of the 
" celifono " on which he had tinkered intermittently more than thirty 
years. 

His inventiveness did not confine itself to merely physical matters. 
Before I left, he pressed upon me a pamphlet of which he was the 
author. It was entitled " The Virgin Maria in America before its 
Discovery by Columbus," wherein the writer "proved beyond ques- 
tion," to use his own words, "that the Blessed Virgin was not an 
unknown personage in America when it was discovered by the Span- 
iards." Beginning a visionary journey in Canada, he descended step 
by step through all the western hemisphere, "proving" by shaky 
tradition, by the doctored yarns of early missionaries, and by personal 
lucubrations that " all the Indian tribes had the tradition of Adam and 
Eve, of the serpent and the apple, of ' original sin/ and of a god born 

207 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

of a virgin." The fact that the city of Loja had published this mas- 
terpiece fully describes its mentality. 

I had known him three or four days before the inventor took me 
into his confidence and whispered that the invention of the " celifono " 
had been merely a means to an end ; that he had taken it to New York 
and Europe in the hope of raising funds to pursue his " really im- 
portant invention," which he had thought on for forty years and al- 
ready perfected " in his mind," though he had not yet begun its con- 
struction. This was a " flying machine that is neither balloon nor 
aeroplane, perfectly safe and commercially practicable." As nearly 
as my unmechanical faculties grasped the situation from his elaborate 
explanation, it was a close replica of that of " Darius Green," whose 
fame has never reached this corner of the Andes. Fortunately there 
is no building in Loja high enough to bring the inventor to serious 
grief, should he ever succeed in collecting the materials essential to the 
actual construction of this perfected child of his imagination. But 
his hope was still youthful, and he besought my advice as to how a 
poor inventor could get his masterpiece before the world without 
being despoiled of the fruits of his labors, as in the case of the 
" cefifono," by the " practical business men " of that great universe 
beyond his mountain-bounded horizon. I regretted my ignorance of 
any panacea for that condition. 

Carrion is but a type of those " closet " geniuses who live, toil, and 
fade away unknown in the dim recesses of the Andes, men in some 
cases who might have ranked high among modern inventors, writers, or 
artists, had their lot been cast in happier climes than in this leaden 
environment of impracticability, burdened by enervating superstitions, 
denied the simplest materials for their purposes in a land where even 
twine and wrapping-paper are commonly unobtainable, and so lacking 
in that grasping self-assertiveness so necessary to front modern so- 
ciety successfully that even the scant fruits of their labors go to swell 
the already swollen pockets of more "practical" men of the world, 
while they dream on like this gray-haired boy pottering among his 
home-made toys. 



208 




The church, and the dwelling of my host, the priest of Ofla 




Loja, southernmost city of Ecuador, backed by her endless labyrinth of mountains 



CHAPTER IX 

THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

I HAD been a full half-year in Ecuador when I turned my attention 
to the problem of getting out of it. That disintegration, that 
tendency for neighboring countries to hold no comunication be- 
tween each other, at which the American cannot but marvel in South 
America, was here in full evidence. Ecuador seemed as completely cut 
off from the country just over her southern boundary as from Europe. 
The cura of Ofia had assured me that the one way to reach Peru from 
Loja would be to walk to Puerto Bolivar on the coast, take a coster o to 
Guayaquil, then a " big steamer " to Paita or Pacasmayo ! Only he 
who knows South American geography well can appreciate the uncon- 
scious humor of such advice. Even the rare lojanos who admitted 
it might be possible to go to Peru "by land" asserted that I must 
walk to Piura, which would have been to cross a burning tropical 
desert far out of my way, to that well-traveled coast I was purposely 
avoiding. The government map of the province of Loja was as faulty 
and scanty of information as the American one I carried. It showed 
a road leading south from the provincial capital into that blue-black 
" labyrinth of mountains," through the villages of Vilcabamba and 
Valladolid; but all the town was agreed that no one could travel in 
these modern days along the remnants of the great military highway 
of the Incas, crawling along the crest of the Cordillera Oriental 
through regions for days utterly uninhabited; and well I knew that 
Prescott's "hanging withe bridges over awful chasms" were^ure to 
be out of repair in these effeminate Latin-American times, even where 
they ever existed. 

.At length a few bold lojanos admitted that I might be able to push 
on to the frontier by way of Gonzanama, though they persisted in call- 
ing it a " terrible undertaking," even for a man who claimed to have 
walked from Quito. That route led far west of a line drawn through 
Huancabamba to Cajamarca, and there was nothing to show that it 
would connect with any trail beyond the frontier. The best I could 
do was to hope I might be able to struggle across to Ayavaca, in 
Peru, where I could perhaps get Peruvian information. Then there 

209 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

came a complete division of opinion as to the road to Gonzanama, and 
Loja split into two irreconcilable factions, the one contending that I 
should take the road due south from the west side of the plaza, the 
other insisting on that due west from the south side. In the end they 
all washed their hands of the matter. The rainy season was nearing 
its height; sure death lurked along the bandit-infested frontier; none 
but amphibious animals and crack-brained gringos would stir forth 
from the cozy little city. 

On the morning of April twentieth I finally took the south road. 
It climbed leisurely over the low interandean nudo shutting in Loja's 
concave valley and, falling in with a hurried mountain stream, raced 
with it all day, crossing its branches sometimes by one-log bridges, 
more often by knee-deep fords. The few arrieros I met carried rusty 
old flint-locks, suggesting the dangers of the frontier; the huts along 
the way grew more and more rare, and degenerated from thick adobe 
walls to upright reeds carelessly stopped with mud. Beyond Malaca- 
tos, among its banana groves, where I spent the night on a plank 
bench in the casa cural of a young French priest who had already lost 
the habit of speaking anything but Spanish, the trail climbed relent- 
lessly up through a scrub-wooded region as uninhabited as an un- 
discovered sphere. The afternoon was middle-aged before the world 
opened out again and gave a brief glimpse through the trees of Gon- 
zanama, set out in three rows on a tiny plain untold depths below. 
Raging rains had torn and gullied the further slope until the five 
miles downward was like descending the ruins of a giant's stairway. 

Gonzanama was in fiesta. Hundreds of near-Indians and mestizos, 
with very little color in their garments, squatted about the church and 
casa cural. They were a people as simple and unsophisticated as 
children. It was Viernes Santo (Good Friday), and all the town 
gathered around to see me eat the meat a pious old woman served me 
with a shrug of her shoulders when I scorned her warning not to 
" anger the saints," and dispersed prophesying an early calamity to me 
on the road ahead when I arose apparently uninjured. The son. of 
the teniente politico in whose house I was the honored guest, in so 
far as their means made honoring possible, proved to be an* old ac- 
quaintance, a second-year medical student of Quito, home on his va- 
cation. He was already the chief practicing physician of the region. 
On his journey from the capital he had performed a score of opera- 
tions, among them one with a butcher-knife for abscess of the liver. 
The room I occupied, which was also his place of consultation, the 

2TO 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

family parlor, the municipal offices, and his own sleeping quarters, 
was invaded by a constant stream of uncomplaining infirmities. Out- 
side, the entire population marched in procession until midnight, at- 
tended a two-hour service in the adobe church, and wandered the 
three streets with throbbing tomtoms and the gaiety imbibed from bot- 
tles until the eastern horizon paled to gray. The practicing medical 
student did not take to his bed until four, and an hour later he arose 
to set me on my way, forcing upon me, with regal eloquence, a can of 
salmon from " Europe, your own land," to be opened only on Easter 
Sunday. 

Only those rare mortals who have jaunted cross-country in the 
Andes can have any conception of the stone-quarry heights I scaled, 
the dense- jungled, bottomless quebradas through which I tore my way, 
the brush-tangled streams I forded, and the paths that faded out under 
my feet during that day. One of these last had dragged me remorse- 
lessly over every manner of ruggedness when, well on in the afternoon, 
it disappeared at the door of a mud-plastered hut. The trails of the 
Andes do not run merely from town to town, but from hovel to 
hovel, like foraging soldiers, giving the traveler a zigzag course that 
at least trebles the distance. I was prowling about this apparently 
unoccupied human kennel, striving to pick up the 'scent again, when 
I was set upon by three unusually large, aggressive curs. I did my 
best to drive them off with sticks and stones, but when there remained 
no other alternative I drew my weapon and sent the largest to his 
happy hunting-grounds. Instantly a crashing of the bushes sounded „ 
high up in a jungled patch above, and the angry voice of an unseen 
countryman screamed in the dialect of the region: " Scoundrel, you '11 
pay me for my dog, caramba ! " Crime is frequently immune so near 
an international boundary, and I rounded the hillside cautiously, my 
cocked revolver in hand ; but the bellowing of the invisible native was 
soon swallowed up behind me, and only the oppressive silence of the 
mountain solitude surrounded me once more. 

It was evident that I should not reach the frontier, perhaps not even 
shelter, before dark, when, at some distance off, in a setting of primeval 
forest solitude I was astonished to catch sight of a large hacienda 
house, a gaunt, rambling building that suggested some starving creature 
lost in the wilderness. Almost as I reached it a thunder-storm broke 
with a crash, and set a hundred brooks tearing their way down the swift 
mountainside on which the building clung. The house was locked and 
unoccupied. Two Indian boys of eight and twelve were huddled 

211 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

under the projecting eaves of a half-ruined outbuilding across the cob- 
bled yard. For a full hour they answered my every question with 
" El patron no 'sta," uttered in the dull, monotonous voice of some 
mechanical instrument. I cajoled them at last to start a fagot-fire on 
the earth floor of the outbuilding, and to heat a pot of water into which 
I dropped three eggs they were prevailed upon to produce from a hid- 
ing-place in the thatch, and beat the mess up with a stick into a " caldo 
de huevos." The smaller boy finally accepted a bribe to crawl out 
through a hole in the wall into the drenching downpour and snatch 
a half-dozen cholos, ears of green corn, which I roasted, or, more 
exactly, burned here and there over the scanty fire. 

Prowling about the hacienda house when the storm slackened, I 
found in one end a room that was " locked " with a piece of string. 
According to the now less speechless boys, it was the hacienda 
" school," in which at certain seasons an employee of the " patron " 
taught the male children of those peons who paid $2 a year tuition. 
Like an old lumber-room or garret in appearance, the place was fur- 
nished with an ancient desk and a massive chair, as crude as if they 
had been carved out of tree-trunks with dull machetes, and a dozen 
faded copy-books and medieval inkwells hung about the walls. The 
school-master evidently made his home here during the school season, 
for in the far end of the room stood a log-hewn bedstead with a rough 
board flooring. Dusk was thickening into wet night when the Indian 
boys crept up to where I sat on the broad veranda overlooking a far- 
reaching, yet indistinct vista of wooded mountains and valleys, to as- 
sure me I should be killed and robbed during the night. 

" We are all so poor here that when a rich man like your Grace 
passes everyone tries to rob him," asserted the older, with unusual 
eloquence for his race. " Here all the people are robbers Hace pocos 
dias — Jt is only a few days since a traveler was killed down in the 
valley there. Last month — " 

I glanced over my travel-worn and bespattered form in vain for the 
evidences of wealth so patent to other eyes, yet I could not but recall 
the carcass of a dog a few miles back, and the golden weight of the 
band of my trousers reminded me that several evil-eyed fellows 
had halted awhile under the hacienda eaves during the height of the 
storm and slipped away somewhere into the night. Moreover, the 
prophesied destruction of all Ecuador by earthquake was at hand, for 
the morrow would be — if it ever came — Easter Sunday. Plainly, all 
the signs pointed to an exciting night. 

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THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

My small faith in prophecy did not, however, hinder me from mak- 
ing sure that my revolver was well-oiled and hung on a bed-post. The 
window of the school-room, high above the ground, but only a few 
feet from the roof of an old ruin, was heavily barred — with bars 
of wood ! The massive double-leaf plank doors had no lock. The 
log-like pupils' bench, topped by the old colonial teacher's chair, piled 
against it, however, promised racket enough to wake me in case of 
attempted intrusion. I found several old sacks to serve as " mat- 
tress " and, stripping off my sweat-heavy day garb, slipped into the 
woolen union-suit and socks that made up my sleeping costume. 
However much I might reduce my load in my indifference to outward 
appearance, I would not have been without this complete change for 
the night if I had had to make two trips to fetch them. I had no 
matches, and the boys had been unable to produce a candle. The rain 
had died down and everywhere utter stillness reigned. I rolled up in 
my poncho and fell asleep. 

A suspicious noise woke me in what was probably a few minutes. 
Scores of mice were scampering over the uneven floor, squeaking 
hilariously. By the time I had grown accustomed to the sound, I had 
dozed off again. From a chaotic dream of crowded and varied in- 
cidents I came gradually to the consciousness of a rattling at the 
wooden window-bars. I sprang across the floor and peered out into 
the unfathomable mountain night; but I have never been certain 
whether the sound I heard was the hurrying of bare feet in soft mud 
and the tail of a whisper, or the creature of a startled imagination. 
With thirty half-perpendicular miles in my legs I was in no mood to sit 
up waiting for trouble, and making sure once more that my revolver 
was within easy reach, I set the bed-floor creaking again. My next 
consciousness was of a dawn bright with the promise of an unclouded 
day peering in upon me through the window-bars, and of the Indian 
boys whispering through the barricaded door to know whether I was 
still alive and ready for the two raw eggs they had collected. 

An erratic mountain path that it was not easy to distinguish from 
the beds of mountain brooks, and generally deep in mud, clambered 
without apparent direction into dripping-wet wooden mountain ranges, 
sometimes plunging headlong down through bottomless valleys, some- 
times flanking them in enormous horseshoe curves. How I pushed on 
all the morning without getting lost I do not know, for certainly there 
were a score of times when there was no plausible excuse for picking 
the right one of a half-dozen paths. I sighted several miserable huts, 

213 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

and once a village, but these were never near the trail; and when I 
decided to apply for food at the next one, another of those sudden 
changes of climate left the dripping forested mountains behind me, and 
underfoot was a desert-dry world which even the hardy dwellers of 
two decrepit knock-kneed huts had long since abandoned. In southern 
Ecuador and northern Peru the Andes break up and all but disinte- 
grate. There are still plenty of mountains, but, true to their Latin- 
American environment, they lack team-work, and do not stick to- 
gether sufficiently to give the traveler footing upon them. Directly 
before me Ecuador fell unfathomably away to the Macara, like an 
auburn hair across a painted landscape, while beyond, to appearances 
unattainable, Peru lay piled pellmell into the southern sky. It was 
as if the Carpenter of the Universe had said : " Let here be the divid- 
ing line between two distrusting nations," and had smote the earth with 
His mightiest tool. Over all the scene was a sun-baked, utterly unin- 
habited silence, as of some valley of desolation from which all life had 
forever fled. 

The trail down which I jolted had exploded into a score of barely 
visible paths that spread in every direction over the drear, furnace-hot 
hills. It seemed as if, once near the frontier, every traveler either 
dashed blindly forward to get quickly across it unseen, or lost his 
courage and fled back into the interior. I set a due course for the 
thread-like river almost directly below. At high noon, my every joint 
jarred loose, I stood at last on the extrenle edge of Ecuador, the red- 
dish-brown waters of the Macara lapping at my blistered feet, and on 
every hand a blazing, utterly unpeopled desert, with nowhere the 
vestige of track or trail. 

The river, nearly a quarter-mile wide, swollen by the rains above, 
raged swiftly by, a barrier of unknown possibilities. Its surface, 
covered everywhere with ripples, suggested that it was less deep than 
broad. I piled my baggage on the shore and, stripping to the waist, 
waded in. The powerful current all but swept me off my feet and the 
water quickly reached my upper garments. I returned to strip en- 
tirely, strapped my revolver about my chest and, picking a stout stick 
from the undergrowth, fought my way inch by inch to the opposite 
shore. But I had to go back to Ecuador for my possessions. It re- 
quired five crossings, trusting only a few of them at a time to the 
treacherous current, and more than an hour of unremitting vigilance, 
before I had landed my bedraggled belongings at last on the shores 
of Peru, more forlorn than at the landing of Pizarro and his fellow- 

214 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

adventurers. By careful calculation, checked by native record, I 
was 466 miles south of Quito and 630 from the Colombian border. 

Under some barbed bushes I picked a sand-burr spot as nearly 
shaded as could be found along the desert bank, and, having shaved, 
that I might enter the new republic in disguise, dipped up a can of 
coffee-colored Macara and fell upon the lead-heavy rapadura the In- 
dian boys had sold me, and the can of salmon which I had preserved 
for Easter Sunday only by the exercise of • sternest will-power. It 
was three fourths full of a pale, watery, soup-like liquid in which 
floated dejectedly a few small lumps of what had once long ago been 
carp or dog-fish. Luckily there was a difference in the size of the 
cans, so that I could generally tell whether I was drinking salmon or 
the Macara. Then, when I had written up my notes, I proceeded to 
turn the meal into a banquet in comparison, by reading that chapter of 
Prescott recounting what Pizarro and his fellow-tramps did not find 
to eat on their first landing. Being far from mortal ken in an un- 
charted crack of the earth, it may be fancied I should have been eager 
to hurry on. Somehow, now I had reached Peru, there came over me 
a languorous indifference to further advance. The sun was low be- 
fore I rose and turned my attention to the task of discovering my 
whereabouts. 

I found myself gazing along a dreary, sheer mountain-wall, grown 
only with sparse, bristling cactus shrubs that refused a hand-hold, seek- 
ing a place to insert my toes and start southward. Leisurely, but de- 
cidedly, I grasped the first possibility, and for an hour or more might 
have been seen — had there been eyes to see — playing goat along the 
face of calcined hills that fell so abruptly into the racing Macara that 
they came a score of times uncomfortably near taking me with them. 
During that hour I advanced fully five hundred yards — in a direction 
I did not care to go — gathering cactus thorns at every step, and ended 
down at the edge of the river again, exactly as far into Peru as when I 
had begun the struggle upward an hour before. Here were a few 
yards of level shore, and when I had drunk the stream perceptibly 
lower, I made my way along until I came upon a labyrinth of cow- 
paths. That one which most nearly agreed with my compass turned 
due east and crawled off through the bushes, as if fearful of being fol- 
lowed, and left me standing pathless in a maze of barren, cactus-grown 
hills. Tearing my way over them by dead reckoning, now struggling 
to a thorn-barricaded summit from which stretched vistas of more 
thorny- jungled hills, now crashing with lacerated skin down into an- 

215 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

other desert valley, where a few wild jack-asses browsed on the scanty 
leaves of bristling bushes, I surmounted again and again the same 
identical scene of dreary nothingness as far as the eye could see 
beyond. 

The region was waterless. Evidently I was doomed to suffer that 
hell of the desert traveler, an all-night thirst; for dusk was already 
thickening. The very leaves of the invariably thorny bushes were 
shrivelled and brown. Even the air seemed wholly devoid of moisture. 
Then suddenly, as I tore my way to another tangled summit, there 
sounded faintly, far off to the right, the sweetest music known to the 
tropical wanderer, — the babble of running water. I plunged down 
through the militant vegetation to where a clear little river was hurry- 
ing down along a bed several times too large for it to join the parent 
Macara. Enormous boulders and tumbled rocks bordered the stream. 
In the tail of the day I stumbled along up it, jealous of being separated 
from it as from a beloved being ; and when night called a halt I stacked 
my belongings and spread my poncho on the stony bank with its prattle 
in my ears, that it should not escape unheard during the night. The 
brigands reputed to infest the frontier had faded away into the nebu- 
lous realms of fiction. I would almost have invited robbery for an 
opportunity to inquire my whereabouts. But the stream muffled my 
movements and the munching of the lump of crude sugar, and when 
I had listened awhile to the singing of the tropical night, and watched 
the fireflies coming with their lanterns to look me over, I fell asleep, 
uncovered and but slightly dressed, so warm was this sunken chasm of 
the Andes. 

The fate of serving as banquet-board to platoons of tropical insects 
robbed me of the sound sleep the lullaby of the stream should have 
afforded. Dawn found me emerging from a dip, and when I had dis- 
ciplined a stomach that seemed sure to have its plaints unheeded for 
the rest of the day at least by eating bit by bit the remaining lump of 
rapadura, I took up the serious problem of how to get somewhere else. 
The ghost of a path crossed the stream not far above, but soon 
played the stale joke of fading to a goat trail, then into thin air, and 
left me to tear my way back to the stream. This, I noted, came down 
more or less from the south, and I set out along it, determined to push 
as far up country as possible. For several hours I had explored my 
way more or less southward, crossing the wandering stream every few 
yards by goat-like jumps from rock to rock, when I was suddenly 
startled by the sight of human beings. A sun-scorched Indian woman 

216 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

in some remnants of garments, a child astride her back, a boy at her 
heels, appeared from nowhere in the boulder-strewn river-bed. With 
a laconic greeting, she led the way up-stream. Once she took to the 
jungled plain beside it, and sent the boy up a tree to knock down some 
half-green oranges. Down in the river-bed again the god of the Incas 
poured down his perpendicular rays like molten lead. At length 
the woman mumbled a few words in a monotone, pointed out a faint 
path up the face of the eastern sand cliff, in which hundreds of scream- 
ing parrakeets had their nests, grasped the coin I held out to her, and 
glided noiselessly away into the wilderness. The path disappeared 
even sooner than I had expected. I clambered up several more per- 
pendicular miles, only to descend and lose myself in a jungle-tangled 
quebrada. Inch by inch I tore my way through the densest wilder- 
ness of briars and brambles, struggling to release the bundle on my 
shoulders after I had myself escaped, ever on the watch for snakes 
and wild animals. Without real food for days, burning with tropical 
thirst, my hand to hand conflict with the jungle was near a dead-lock 
when there appeared far above me three scattered Indian huts. A 
precipitous ravine, armed to the teeth, lay between. I dived down into 
it, to emerge almost an hour afterward, torn, bleeding, and smeared 
with earth, at the edge of another and hitherto unseen jungled chasm, 
backed by a nearly impassable patch of uncultivated sugar-cane. My 
legs were as ropes of sand when I approached an Indian in his hut 
door, but I set up a stern outward appearance to suggest what might 
happen if he refused me food and drink. 

Though expressionless as all his race, he proved unusually tract- 
able, and soon brought out to where I sat in the shade against the 
eastern hut-wall a steaming gourdful of the ordinarily despised yuca, 
and what seemed to be very young pork. I had half-emptied the dish 
before a bone too tiny for such an origin caused me to look up inquir- 
ingly. 

" Cui," said the Indian laconically. 

Though I had often heard them squeaking about the earth floors 
of wayside huts, it was my first taste of guinea-pig, to this day the 
chief meat of the Andean Indian. I think it was not entirely due to 
my prolonged fast that I found it more palatable than pork; but 
small, distressingly small, even after the Indian's mate had added 
several choclo tandas, steaming rolls of crushed green corn wrapped in 
husks. 

The camino real to Ayavaca lay in plain sight across the gully, 

217 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

and the town, according to the Indian, was but two leagues off. But 
the Andean traveler must learn not to let his hopes grow buoyant and 
playful, and to remember that two leagues from the lips of an abor- 
iginal is as apt to mean a hard day's travel as an hour's stroll. Never 
once did the " royal highway " pause in its climb into the lofty range 
ahead. My spirits rose and fell with each opportunity to inquire the 
distance. Within two hours I had been answered : " Two leagues," 
" six leagues," " four hours," " ya no 'sta lejos," " Todavia 'sta retir- 
adita," " Ah, it is far away, patron," and " More than two tambos " — a 
tambo, from the Inca word for inn, or rest-house, seems to mean about 
a half day's travel. Sunset found me far up on a great bleak table- 
land, a rolling, broken world, wherein was no suggestion of a town, 
stretching away on all sides as far as the eye could reach even in the 
transparent air of these heights. 

Beyond, the trail passed close to a large tiled house where a bare- 
foot man of Indian type, though white of skin as myself, answered my 
request for posada by silently spreading a small square of cloth on a 
log under the projecting eaves, and went on with his task of mending 
with an adz the crooked stick that served him as plow. An enam- 
elled sign on the house-wall, announcing it an " Estanco de Sal," was 
the only outward evidence that I had left Ecuador behind. In Peru, 
salt, like tobacco, is a government monopoly, sold only in licensed 
shops. Near me several thinly attired women were balling newly dyed 
yarn, and children were sprawling about the ground with goats, 
chickens, and yellow curs. A heavy rain was falling. Uncomfort- 
able as was my position, I could do nothing else than keep it. It was 
not that the family was indifferent or hard-hearted, merely that I had 
reached what, to their apathetic way of life, was a happy state, — sitting 
on a log under the eaves, and it would hardly have been possible to 
explain to them that something else would have been needed for per- 
fect comfort. The man was plainly of kindly temperament, with some 
education, of a sort, yet I was left to squat on the log until black night 
had settled down, without even an opportunity to remove the outer 
evidence of the gaunt and strenuous days behind. 

Well after dark a half-Indian girl set before me a little wooden 
box, covered it with a cloth, and served me an egg soup, followed by 
a hot stew of yuca and beans. Gradually the family advanced from 
self-conscious silence to Latin garrulousness. By the time I had been 
invited inside and given one of several bare divans of reeds set into 
the mud walls, the conversation I had sought in vain to set going dur- 

218 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

ing the first hours ran on unchecked until long after I would have been 
asleep. 

A dense fog enveloping the mountainside turned to rain as I waded 
away in the morning. Only by waiting hours could I have gotten 
anything more than the " aguita," a cup of hot water with a bit of 
rapadura melted in it, on which I set out for, whatever the new day 
had in store. I had only half-suspected the height of the world before 
me. For hours I strained upward into ever cooler, green mountains, 
reeking mud underfoot, with some travel, yet always a sense of soli- 
tude, even just over the next knoll beyond a passing group. Once I 
met a blind traveler picking his way quite swiftly with his stick along 
the slippery, descending mountain road. By noon I was far up where 
the rivers are born, fog and clouds hiding all but the immediate world 
about me. All the hunger of the past days seemed to have accumu- 
lated, until I felt like some starving beast of prey, ready to pounce 
pitilessly upon whatever fell in my way. Just beyond the abra, the 
cold, fog-swept pass at the summit of the climb, I came upon a house 
of considerable size. Half skating, half wading down to the door, I 
found an old and a young woman of much Indian blood squatting in 
the earth-floored kitchen near a large steaming kettle over the familiar 
three-stone cooking- stove of the Andes. 

" No hay absolutamente nada," they replied unfeelingly. 

I stepped in, swung off my load, and, showing Peruvian silver, an- 
nounced that I had come to stay until they had sold me food. The 
women sat motionless, with that passiveness the Indian so often de- 
pends upon to drive off importunate persons. I offered any reasonable 
price for one of the chickens wandering about the room. The older 
woman rrfumbled that clumsy, threadbare lie, " Son ajenos " (they be- 
long to someone else). To my suggestion of roasted plantains she 
answered that she was ill. When I inquired the contents of the kettle, 
both took refuge in the exasperating silence that is the last weapon of 
their race. A certain amount of patience is a virtue ; too much is an 
asininity. I picked the kettle off the fire, raked from the ashes one of 
the roasting plantains, found a tin plate and a wooden spoon stuck 
behind a sapling beam of the mud wall, and retired again to the block 
of wood on which I had been seated. The pair watched me in stolid 
silence. When I had filled the plate the younger one rose to carry off 
the kettle. I requested her, in the voice of an ill-tempered general 
commanding a widely scattered regiment, to leave it where it was until 
I had had my fill, and the pair fled precipitously from the room, flinging 

219 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

over their shoulders some threat of calling the man of the house. I 
knew the Andean Indian too well to fear trouble, but turned my face 
to the door and loosened my revolver in its holster. The kettle con- 
tained a boiling-hot stew of beans and corn, sufficient to have fed a 
dozen men. Six of them might still have feasted on what was left 
when I tossed a sol, easily four times the whole kettle's worth, into the 
empty plate and marched on down the reeking mountainside. 

Had I but known it, however, I might have avoided resorting to 
force. Barely a mile beyond appeared Ayavaca, a dismal and order- 
less collection of gloomy adobe, tiled houses, sprawling on the edge 
of what evidently would have been a great valley on a clear day, and 
literally running with red mud. I skated down into the plaza and, 
marching into the open office of the subprefect, sent the bedraggled 
soldier on guard to announce my arrival. A gaping group of awk- 
ward, mud-bespattered mountaineers quickly surrounded me, but with 
them arrived several white men in modern garb, one of whom an- 
nounced himself subprefect of the province of Ayavaca, entirely at 
my service. I displayed my American and Ecuadorian documents, re- 
questing him to take official cognizance of my entry into Peru, and ex- 
pressed my august desire to rent for a day or two a room with bed, 
table, chair and water supply — experience teaches the Andean trav- 
eler to specify in detail — and to be handed the menu card. 

" Here you are in your own house," replied the subprefect, assum- 
ing the attitude of a sovereign receiving credentials from an ambassa- 
dor ; " You have only to ask." 

A cloth was soon spread on the official government desk and, less 
than an hour after requisitioning rations in the mountain hut, I was 
sitting with the provincial commander and his assistants before an 
abundance of native viands that included even the luxury of wheat 
bread. For I had chanced to arrive just in time for the " ban- 
quet " offered by the town to its new ruler in honor of his inaugura- 
tion. 

But alas, I had gained nothing in comfort by coming to Peru. The 
available chamber in " my own house " proved to be a den adjoining 
the subprefect's quarters, the provincial harness-and-lamp room. It 
was only by much cajolery that I finally got it furnished with a 
narrow five-foot plank bench and a pair of ragged horse-blankets. 
But at least I could read by night such literature as I chanced to have 
with me — by depriving the town of one of its few street-lamps when 
a soldier came to distribute them in the evening. 

220 




In the semi-tropical Province of Jaen, in north Peru, sugarcane grows luxuriantly. Lack of 
labor and transportation, however, renders it difficult to make full use of the fertility 




The sugar that is not turned into aguardiente, or native whiskey, is boiled down in the trapiche 

into crude brown blocks, variously known as panela, chancaca, rapadura, ent- 

panisado, papelon, etc., weighed and wrapped in banana-leaves, selling 

at about 5 cents for 3 pounds 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

Life was dismal at best m Ayavaca. The cold arid clammy down- 
pour continued unabated. While I developed my exposed films in 
water supplied by an eavestr'ough, the population blocked the doorway 
of my " room," making evei-y exit and entry like boarding a subway 
train in the rush hour. There were no real shops in the dreary 
mountain town, but only gloomy mud huts where a few products were 
unofficially sold. The one sidewalk was taken up by drenched and 
downcast asses, forcing pedestrains to splash through the unpaved 
street. The products of the soil were not high priced: A guinea- 
pig — next to children the most plentiful product of the town — cost 
five cents ; a live chicken, fifteen ; but it was always easier to pay the 
price than to find the chicken for sale. Commerce was on the friend- 
to-friend basis, and he who would purchase must be well acquainted 
with the seller, or a protege of the all-powerful subprefect. Only 
liquor was to be had in abundance. The provincial officials, from my 
host down to the village school-master, were more or less intoxicated 
from mid-morning to midnight. In that state, frankness protruded 
through their racial courtesy, and they were divided in their assertions 
between the opinion that I was a spy sent out by my government and 
the conviction that I had been offered some colossal prize for covering 
the world on foot. It was with difficulty that I avoided sinking into 
the general intoxication. Whenever two or three are gathered to- 
gether in Peru, it is the custom for one of the group to fill a glass from 
the inevitable bottle — and Peruvian aguardiente is no harmless nec- 
tar — then ask permission to drink the health of Tal Fulano on his 
right. " Muchas gracias," says Tal Fulano, and proceeds to drink 
next — from the same glass — the health of his nearest companion; 
and so on round and round the circle to infinity and complete in- 
sobriety. The inexperienced gringo who fails in the etiquette of this 
custom, whatever the number of rounds, is looked upon with much 
the same contempt as the American who lets his saloon companions 
" set 'em up " repeatedly without offering to do so himself ; and runs 
the risk of having an incensed subprefect, too far gone in frankness, 
turn upon him and invite him to make his home elsewhere. 

Every minute of the day following my arrival it rained, slackening 
somewhat at rare intervals, only to begin again with a roar that 
sounded like an avalanche down a nearby mountainside. Twenty- 
four hours later my films were as wet as when first hung up. Water 
and mud invaded even our minds. Rivers of liquid mud raced down 
every street and across the broad, half-cobbled plaza. Not once dur- 

221 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

ing the day did the eye catch a hint of the great valley on the edge of 
which Ayavaca is perched. The few res dents forced to go out of 
doors wore suecos, wooden clog overshoes, something like the rainy-day 
footwear of the Japanese, that increased ine. wearer's height by a half- 
foot or more. The majority huddled in their dreary mud houses, 
crowding into the low doorways to stare after me when I passed, com- 
menting aloud on my raison d'etre. 

The post-master of Ayavaca was a comely young woman of con- 
siderable Indian blood, her office scattered promiscuously about the 
baked mud-dwelling of her parents. I had concluded to mail the 
films and notebooks on hand, rather than risk their loss or destruction 
in what promised to be difficult going ahead, and having ransacked the 
town for the necessary wrapping paper, and tied the package with 
government tape, I presented it for registry. It seemed better to make 
a clear breast of the matter than to risk the Pandoric curiosity of the 
Ayavaca postal system, and I explained that, while the contents was 
of vast value to me and the future history of Peru, it was of none 
whatever to anyone else. Stamps were at length found in the right- 
hand drawer of the hand sewing-machine on the earth floor, a native 
ink was brewed over the fagot-fire in the kitchen for the imprinting 
of the official seal, dug out from a chest of stockings and feminine 
small-clothes, and after a social call of more than an hour's duration 
I shook hands with the entire family, twice with the post-mistress her- 
self, and left with her repeated reassurance ringing in my ears : 

" No tenga cuidado — lose no sleep over it, sehor ; it will go safely 
to Europe and the United States without being lost." 

Some time after dark, the rain having at last left off with sullen 
grace, I was limbering up my legs for an early start in the morning 
when I chanced to pass the correo. The door was closed ; but this was 
one of the few houses of Ayavaca boasting a window — though with- 
out glass, unknown to most towns of the Andes — barricaded with 
wooden bars. Inside, gathered about an apathetic candle, sat the post- 
mistress and her entire family, the open package in her lap — passing 
my films from hand to hand and puzzling in vain over my notebooks, 
with a leisureliness that showed they had settled down to make the 
most of a long evening's entertainment. My first impulse to snatch 
open the door was succeeded by reflection. Knowing the extreme sen- 
sibility of these Andean townsmen, I suspected that, were my discovery 
known to her, the post-mistress would be more than apt, out of pique, to 
lose or destroy the cause of her undoing before I could recover them 

222 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

from government possession. I swallowed the impulse and splashed 
on through the night. 

Months afterward I had word that the package reached the ad- 
dressee in perfect condition, though in disorder. 

With little more information than that the next town I must hunt 
out of the wilderness was Huancabamba, I slid down the red slopes 
from Ayavaca, now and then glancing back to wonder what excuse 
even Spaniards could have considered sufficient to found a town in 
such a location. The subprefect, far from providing the Indian guide 
and carrier he had so often promised in his cups, had bade me " adios " 
from his bed, with the cheering assurance that I was bound soon to lose 
my way and perish. My load was several pounds heavier than on my 
arrival ; for I had added to it not only a block of rapadura and seven- 
teen loaves of bread — Ayavaca size — but a huge chunk of fresh 
beef. Even my money had become a burden again, for instead of the 
bills of Ecuador my " road-change " must now be carried in silver. 
The semi-monthly daily of Ayavaca had appeared the evening before 
with an astonishing history of the town's distinguished guest, honoring 
me with the title of " that intrepid explorer," a designation which the 
subprefect made use of in his official orders to his subordinates along 
the way, and which, copied from one document to another, was 
destined to cling to me all the length of Peru. My eye never fell upon 
it that I did not recall the native dishes I was so often forced to delve 
into during the journey. 

Gibbon asserts that the civilization of a country may best be gaged 
by the number and condition of its roads. If so, northern Peru is 
sunk in the depths of barbarism. The Incas swung bridges of withes 
along their great military highways, the Spaniards built some of stone ; 
the modern inhabitants of this region merely let their roads grow up 
of themselves, like brambles in an uncultivated field. At a mountain 
summit, beyond a raging mountain current in which I all but lost my 
possessions, immense gray curtains of fog left me only instinct and 
my compass by which to choose between the faint sandy paths that 
split and forked at every opportunity. The trail I happened to take 
zigzagged quickly down into the bed of a snarling mountain stream 
between sheer rock walls, choked with tough, thorny undergrowth, 
along which it sprang back and forth from rock to rock, dragging me 
in pursuit through an endless tangle of vegetation, often by vaulted 
tunnels through which I could only tear my way by creeping on all 
fours. By dusk it had widened sufficiently to give the path foothold 

223 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

along one bank, and when darkness brought me to a halt, I found space 
under a scraggly tree to spread my poncho. In my pack the seventeen 
loaves of bread had amalgamated with the crude sugar and formed 
a coating about the boiled beef. I stowed away in my hat, for safe- 
keeping, the few more or less whole loaves, and fell upon the pulp that 
remained. It was a dry meal, for all the rain. Though the stream 
close below sounded tantalizingly in my ears all the night through, 
an impenetrable jungle cut me off from it, and only the few wild 
lemons I had picked along the way ministered to the after-thirst of a 
long day's tramp. 

The pleasure of dressing at dawn in garments still dripping wet was 
enhanced by the discovery that a colony of red ants, appointing a 
night-shift, had formed a bread-line from my hat to their neighboring 
village and reduced me to a breakfast of river water where the trail 
again touched the stream a mile beyond. Three solitary hours later 
I came upon a miserable little shack of open-work reeds and upright 
poles topped by thatch. On the ground beside it a slatternly female 
was cooking for several horsemen. Two rivers ahead were reported 
greatly swollen, and I accepted an invitation to wait and accompany 
a youth bound for his employer's hacienda. Wait I did, a full three 
hours, amid the usual fauna of an Andean hut, while the travelers took 
final leave of each other a score of times in as many rounds of 
aguardiente de cana, a native concoction of distilled sugarcane, each 
swallow of which is to an ordinary mortal not unlike a sudden blow on 
the head with a spiked war-club. In the end, a calabash of yuca 
stew rewarded my patience. The youth staggered aboard his shaggy 
horse at last and we descended quickly into a dense, damp-hot valley 
with a broad, swift river. I mounted the horse's rump to cross two 
arms of the stream and a stretch of swamp between, in constant peril 
of tobogganing down the animal's tail, my load dragging heavily from 
my shoulders. The moment I slipped off on dry land, the youth, still 
distinctly under the influence of concentrated sugar-cane, demanded 
a " peseta " for his services. Long, hot hours we marched along 
thick-jungled river beds in narrow, fertile valleys enclosed by sterile, 
though green-tinted mountainsides bristling with cactus. The trail 
panted frequently over a steep desert hillock, the crupper of the animal 
saving me much time in disrobing at a dozen smaller brooks, between 
which my companion rode at my heels in gloomy silence. At a larger 
stream he collected a real and announced that the fee for crossing a 
river ahead would be another " peseta." As the effects of permitting 

224 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

the unbridled drinking of his health wore off, he recalled the fiambre 
in his saddle-bags, and paused to offer me, with the patronizing air 
befitting a horseman toward a man afoot, a handful of parched corn 
and a rag of sun-dried beef. Gradually he became less taciturn, then 
garrulous and gay. He was by no means a peon, being assistant 
mayordomo of the estate toward which we were headed, and even 
wore shoes. Yet when I photographed him, it required considerable 
explanation to give him any clear conception of what the result would 
be of " pointing the foolish little machine " at him. 

" Y su aposento, donde esta? " (Where is your lodging — i.e., native 
land?) he inquired. 

When I had answered, he rode fully ten minutes in puzzled silence. 
Then he called out over his shoulder: 

" Y ese pais suyo, ese Esta'os Uni'os, es pueblo 6 hacienda? " (That 
country of yours, is it a village or a plantation?) 

The world, as he knew it — and his knowledge was on a par with 
that of thousands of dwellers in the Andes — was made up of those 
two divisions. 

We left a curving river, labored over a divide, and descended to 
the Aranza, a furlong wide, roaring angrily. At sight of it the 
youth regretted the bargain he had made, fearing his horse could not 
breast the swift current under the weight of both of us, and suggested 
that I strip and swim, letting him carry my clothing and bundle. 
There seemed to be no way to avoid risking the wealth in my trousers ; 
but these simple countrymen of the Andes are commonly more reliable 
in matters of trust than appearances suggest, and a well-directed bullet 
would avert any tendency to decamp. I strapped my revolver about 
my head and plunged in for a ten-minute struggle with the current, 
but it was not without relief that I landed beside the exhausted horse 
and regained my possessions. We were already within the territory 
of the " Hacienda San Pablo," though still miles from the dwelling. 
On all sides, as far as the eye could strain, the river valley and the 
mountains above were unbroken wilderness, utterly uninhabited. Yet 
the region was rich in produce. The chirimoya, that vegetable ice- 
cream of the tropics, hung in car-loads from the trees; small, but 
compact and juicy wild lemons, carpeted the trail. Parrots and 
screaming bands of parrakeets flitted in and out of guayaba and sapote 
trees ; here and there the dense-green dome of a mango tree shouldered 
its way up through its punier fellows of the forest. 

It was nearing dusk, and I was near exhaustion under my load and 

225 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the pitiless tropical sun of seven unbroken hours of swift, rough tramp- 
ing, when my companion pointed out far ahead, where the wall of the 
Central Cordillera shut off the horizon, a red dot in the green immen- 
sity, — the hacienda house. Black night had fallen when we reached 
the half-constructed building, and we stumbled on for some time more 
before we came upon the rambling thatched ruin in which the owner 
still lived. He was Eduardo Medina, once a law student in the Uni- 
versity of San Marcos of Lima, a sane, well-read, earnest man, con- 
trasting strangely with the uncouth countrymen about him. His wife, 
a handsome limeha, was the first woman of education I had so far seen 
in rural South America. This extraordinary Latin-American couple, 
noting the swarms of lawyers that vegetate in provincial capitals, had 
renounced the uninspiring flesh-pots of the cities, and purchasing for a 
song some twenty-five square leagues of semi-tropical solitude, had 
come to start life anew in this wilderness with the shaggy world piled 
up on all sides, and set their race a much needed example. Here was 
such a welcome as the wilderness traveler often dreams, but seldom 
attains. Not merely did they offer the accommodation Andean custom 
requires all hacendados to furnish travelers, each according to his caste, 
but their hospitality was genuine and active. The adobe lean-to into 
which I was led, for the astonishing Andean purpose of " washing up 
before supper," had not only a real bed, mattress and all, on springs of 
split bamboo, but the first sheets and pillows and suggestion of civilized 
comfort I had seen in Peru. It did not require the reminder that the 
morrow was Sunday, and Medina's assertion that they were famished 
for civilized conversation, to make me accept his invitation to prolong 
my stay. My companion of the day never recovered from his astonish- 
ment at seeing the " patron " seat at his own table and treat as an equal 
a man who traveled on foot ; and as often as I caught his eye among the 
group that hovered about the door all the evening, he gazed at me in a 
manner that seemed to implore me not to mention the reals he had col- 
lected under the impression that I was a mere man, and not a caballero. 
Fertile tracts of valleys and mountains twenty-five miles square can 
be bought in this section of Peru for $250. Yet this does not mean 
that wealth awaits the purchaser. " Faltan brazos," as the Peruvian 
puts it ; " arms " are lacking. The scanty population has no stimulus 
to exertion in a region where nature supplies their simple wants almost 
without labor, and to Medina life was a constant struggle for em- 
ployees. In days of fiesta, when money was needed to pay the priest 
or celebrate a festival, many came to contract their services and accept 

226 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

an " advance," but with no representative of government at hand, there 
was no means of forcing them to do the work for which they had 
been prepaid. Some labored languidly and intermittently a few weeks 
a year, none more than half the days that were not sacred to some 
festival and general drunkenness. On the hacienda were a scattered 
score of arrendatarios, native families who rent a patch of ground 
on which to build a hut and plant a bit of yuca and corn, with the 
right to pasture a few cattle on the estate, all for a yearly rental of 
$2, which was commonly as hard to collect as labor. The almost total 
lack of transportation gave no market for any excess of produce, and 
here was the extraordinary case of a university-educated man and 
wife owning what would be with us an entire county, living a hand- 
to-mouth existence very little above abject poverty. Oranges, which 
the owner asserted he would be only too happy to sell at five cents 
a hundred, rotted under the trees faster than the hogs could eat them ; 
mangoes lay where they fell, and the splendid chirimoya was a mere 
worthless wild fruit no one took the trouble to gather, except as per- 
sonal appetite prompted. The sugarcane they succeeded in raising 
they were glad to get any price for, after it had been squeezed in 
trapiches, crude presses run by hand, and the guarapo boiled down 
into blocks of rapadura and wrapped in banana leaves. Most of 
it was turned into aguardiente that could occasionally be sent to 
town. 

My postal experience in Ayavaca recalled to Medina one of his own. 
Before they left Lima to take up their newly acquired residence, the 
couple had found there were two post-offices, at Ayavaca and Pacai- 
pampa, about equal distance from it, — two days on muleback. It 
chanced that Sefiora Medina had ordered her " Modas Femininas " 
sent to Ayavaca, while her husband gave Pacaipampa as his address 
to the subscription department of the daily " El Comercio." After 
the first few numbers only one or two copies of the newspaper adorned 
the weekly mail-bag of the hacienda. La sefiora also noted that she 
was not receiving her fashion journal regularly. The hacendado 
started an investigation. He found that the comely post-mistress of 
Ayavaca had recently acquired a considerable reputation as an au- 
thority on up-to-date fashions. In Pacaipampa he discovered that 
the government mail service was in the hands of an old man unusually 
well versed in the politics of the day. Husband and wife wrote to 
Lima ordering " El Comercio" sent to Ayavaca and the " Modas 
Femininas " by way of Pacaipampa. Since then both had received 

227 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

their respective journals as regularly as transportation conditions in 
these primitive regions made reasonable. 

11 You have no inconvenience in riding ? " asked my host, as we set 
out on horseback to visit the estate on Sunday. 

" Not at all, senor." 

" Then I shall furnish you a mount to Huancabamba," he announced. 

I declined. It seemed foolish to besmirch my long, unbroken record 
afoot. But he insisted on at least sending a peon to carry my baggage 
and to serve as " guide," and actually kept his promise ! 

" It dawned raining," as they say in the Andes, but the peon assigned 
the task, because his rent was in arrears, was already astride a good 
saddle-horse when I stepped out into the storm. Another debtor had 
been ordered to furnish a boiled chicken, the cook, a bag of rice. With 
few respites we zigzagged all day up into the Cordillera Central, ever 
vaster views of the valleys about San Pablo opening out, though ad- 
vancing little except upward. Relieved of my load I seemed to have 
wings, and in the steeper places had often to wait for the horseman. 
Barely a hut and not a traveler did we pass during a day which ended 
with a perpendicular climb to a miserable mud hovel on a high and 
wintry pampa. Alone, accommodation might have been refused me, 
but my companion was distantly related to the two crabbed females 
who, with their tawny flock of half-naked children, existed in this 
cheerless spot, and I was passively suffered to remain. In their mud 
den, where the usual fagot-fire was blazing under an ancient and 
enormous kettle set on three stones, I sat down on a sort of short 
trough with six-inch legs, ' one of the " chairs " of this region, when 
any exist, and some time later we were served in bowls made of 
gourds a boiling-hot mixture of potatoes, habas, and some mountain 
mystery. Still unsatisfied, I drew out my bag of rice. Valgame Dios 
if that lazy cook of the " Hacienda San Pablo " had not delivered it 
to me uncooked ! I followed the custom of the place and circum- 
stances by presenting the women with enough of the grain to feed her 
entire family for a day or two, then asked that a bowlful be cooked for 
me. 

" Now hay manteca — there is no lard," mumbled one of the fe- 
males. 

" Eureka ! " I cried, " Then for once I can have it cooked as it 
should be." 

" There is no other kettle," said the woman in a faint monotone, pro- 
jecting her lips toward that containing the stew. 

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THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

" I will wait until it is empty," I replied cheerfully. 

With no other excuse to offer, she took refuge in silence. An hour 
passed before I broke it again. 

" And the rice, senora," I suggested. 

" No hay manteca," she repeated in the same dull monotone, and 
the conversation went on again around the same vicious circle. For 
more than an hour I coaxed and cajoled, for a single harsh or loud 
word to these unwashed mountain-dwellers can undo a day's careful 
pleading. As constant dripping of water in time wears away even 
stone, so my incessant return to the subject at length became even 
more painful than the stirring from their customary lethargy. The 
younger female rose languidly and took from the wall in a dark corner 
a perfectly sound kettle just suited to the purpose and, after deftly 
stealing about half of it, set to boiling what I had kept for myself. 

The adjoining den had not only an earth floor, but the hillside had 
not been levelled before building. The peon spread a saddle-blanket 
and one of his own ponchos for me as solicitously as a valet pre- 
paring his master's quarters; yet in as impersonal a manner as he 
might have herded his sheep into their corral for the night. With 
this protection, and my own garments wrapped about my head, I 
passed a tolerable night, virtually on the ridge of the central range of 
the Andes. My peon, the two women, several children, two half- 
Indian youths who had arrived long after dark, at least six dogs, and 
a score of guinea-pigs all slept in the same room — all, that is, except 
the cuis, which spent most of it squeaking about in the dark, and now 
and then running over my prostrate form. 

On the bleak, rolling pampa of sear yellow bunchgrass, dotted by 
a few shaggy wild cattle, across which howled wintry winds, I was 
not uncomfortable afoot ; but the peon from the " tierra caliente " of 
his native valley was blue-lipped and chattering with cold, even with 
his head through several heavy blankets and a scarf about his face. 
I was passing back over the Cordillera Central for the first time since 
Hays and I had traversed it by the Quindio pass. Not far below the 
arctic summit we sighted the Huancabamba river, born a few leagues 
to the north, its broad, swift-sloping valley-walls spotted with little 
green chacras, and gradually dropped into summer again. Trees grew 
up about us, birds began once more to sing, cultivated fields shut in by 
cactus hedges bordered the trail. When at last we sighted the town 
of Huancabamba from far off, the peon halted and asked to be allowed 
to turn back. He seemed to fancy his services had been chiefly those 

229 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

of " guide," instead of baggage-carrier. I refused to take up my bur- 
den again merely for what I took to be a whim to be back lolling in 
the shade of his own mango tree. It was not until later that I real- 
ized that, like most country youths of his class in Peru, he dreaded 
entering the provincial capital, lest he be held and forced to serve in 
the army. 

The swift Huancabamba river we crossed astride the peon's horse, 
though not both at a time. When I had dismounted on the further 
bank, my companion called the animal back by a peculiar sound, half 
whistle, half cluck, and not long afterward we clattered into the famous 
city of Huancabamba. Once dismissed, the peon left town at once, 
though darkness was already at hand. Medina had insisted that I 
pay him nothing, as he owed the hacienda more than two years' rent 
— namely, nearly four dollars. 

On the map Huancabamba seems of about the size and importance of 
Philadelphia ; on the ground it is a moribund mud village in a half- 
sterile hollow between barren, towering mountains. Historically it is 
famous. Prescott assures us that " Guancabamba was large, populous 
and well-built, many of its houses of solid stone. A river which passed 
through the town had a bridge over which ran a fine Inca highroad." 
How times do change ! Officially, to be sure, it is still a city ; but a 
" city " in this region is a place where bread is made, as those who 
wear shoes are white, and those who wear bayeta are cholos or Indians. 
Picturesquesness of costume there was none, this having disappeared 
near Cuenca along with the Ouichua tonque. Indians of pure race and 
distinctive garb had been rare south of Zaraguro ; here was still plenty 
of Indian blood, but only in the veins of " civilized " mestizos. It is 
not far from the watershed of the Andes. The town of Huarmaca, 
just up on the ridge of the Cordillera above, has a church one side of 
the roof of which sends its waters to the Pacific, and the other to the 
Atlantic. 

There was no suggestion of hotel. The subprefect studied my 
papers in great curiosity, with half the town looking over his shoul- 
der, before he answered my most important query with : 

" Ah, it is impossible to-day, on such short notice. But to-mor- 
row — " 

" I need it to-day," I protested, knowing it was only a question of 
insisting, to overcome the racial apathy. 

" Then I will give you my bed and sleep on the floor ! " cried the sub- 
prefect. 

230 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

In that pompous moment, with a large delegation of huancabambinos 
looking on, no doubt he would, but such Andean self-sacrifice quickly 
fades away, once the limelight is switched off. 

" I prefer to rent a room of my own," I persisted. 

" Ah, now that is impossible. But to-morrow — " 

I bowed my way out, throwing over my shoulder the information 
that I would go down to the bank of the river and sleep on the ground. 
It would be softer, and there were bathing facilities. Horror spread 
over all faces. A man, an estranjero who came with the recommen- 
dations of great governments ! Impossible ! The city of Huanca- 
bamba could not permit it! When word of it reached the outside 
world . . . ! Soldiers were sent scurrying in all directions — and two 
minutes later one of them found a room for rent in the home of one of 
the " best families," exactly across the street from the subprefectura. 

It can hardly be that I was the first stranger to enter Huancabamba 
since Hernando de Soto was sent by Pizarro to reconnoiter the region 
after the capture of the Inca. Yet one might have fancied so. 
Whether it was due to some canine sense of smell we of less favored 
lands lack, I never succeeded in getting within ten yards of a huanca- 
bambino before he was staring at me with bulging eyes and hanging 
jaw, all work, movement, and even conversation ceasing as I drew near. 
If I passed behind a group on a street corner, their necks went round 
with one accord, like those of owls, and they stared after me in un- 
broken silence as long as I remained in sight. Men and women, well- 
dressed and outwardly intelligent, dodged back into their house or shop 
as I appeared, to call wife or children as they might for a passing circus 
parade. The few sidewalks were really house verandas, sometimes 
roofed, and on all ordinary occasions pedestrians strolled along the 
center of the street. Now there was a stranger in town, virtually all 
took pains to cross to my side of the way, and though it required a 
distinct exertion to climb up to and down from this few yards of raised 
sidewalk, every inhabitant seemed to find some excuse every few min- 
utes to wander by my door at a snail's pace in his noiseless bare feet. 
If I began any species of activity, — to write, load my kodak, read, or 
even to wash my hands, the human stream was clogged like a log-raft 
against a snag and the population stacked up about my door until a 
well-aimed anything broke the keystone log, and gave me again for a 
moment light and air. It was the hospitable huancabambino custom 
to give me greeting, even when I was busy well inside the room, and to 
repeat the phrase in a louder and louder voice until I acknowledged 

231 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

it. Those few who passed on the further side of the street never failed 
to shout " Buenos dias " across at me, though they might have looked in 
upon me a bare two minutes before. Now and then a more friendly 
member of society wandered complacently into the room, to peer over 
my shoulder, or to handle with the innocence of a three-year old child 
such of my possessions as took his fancy. Some drifted in even at 
night, long after I had retired, for, there being no other opening, to 
have closed the door would have been to smother. 

In the far recesses of the Andes the simplest matter may become 
complex. My flannel road-shirt had at last succumbed to its varied 
hardships. Now, buying a shirt may seem too trivial an experience 
to be worthy of mention ; in the wilds of Peru it is a transaction of 
deep importance. Huancabamba is overstocked with cloth-shops; but 
what Latin-American shopkeepers honestly believe a " very heavy 
shirt " would fall to pieces in three days under the exertions of a 
society darling. One garment promising moderate endurance I did 
find, but the combined jangling of all the bells of Quito was as nothing 
compared to its color scheme. Beside it the good old American flag 
would have looked dull and colorless. I set out to find a woman will- 
ing to make a new shirt on the pattern of the old. Most of them did 
not wish to; most of the others were too tired; two or three had less 
commonplace reasons, such as being in mourning, or having a pan to 
wash before Sunday, or a son to be married next week, or not having 
gone to confession recently. Toward noon I caught a shoemaker's 
wife unawares, and had her promise to undertake the task before she 
could think of a plausible excuse. She thought a just price, I to fur- 
nish the cloth, would be twenty cents ! 

I canvassed the shops for heavy khaki. The stoutest on sale was 
flimsy as a chorus-girl's bodice, its color plainly as evanescent as her 
complexion. I chose at last from a bolt of cloth designed for after- 
noon trousers, adding a spool of the strongest thread to be had. Ex- 
perience had long since taught me that the tailors of Latin America 
use a thread so fine that a deep breath is almost sure to burst a seam 
or two. I delivered the materials and retired for a belated almuerzo 
in the mud hut where the daily cow sacrificed to Huancabamba's appe- 
tite is sold in halt-real nibbles. Now and then an urchin entered, 
clutching a nickel in one besmeared fist, to say in the uninflected mono- 
tone of a " piece " learned in school : 

" Media came, media vuelta," (2 cents worth of meat, 2 cents 
change), to which the answer was almost sure to be: 

232 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

"No hay vuelta" (there is no change), whereupon the emissary 
wandered homeward still clutching the coin, and the family evidently 
passed another meatless day. 

Barely had I returned to my room when a fever fell upon me. At 
the height of the attack, when every movement was a mighty effort 
and every motionless moment an hour of deep enjoyment, an urchin 
appeared with the spool of thread I had provided, saying it was heavier 
than Huancabamba was accustomed to use and that I must supply a 
spool of No. 60. I reached for the brick that held back one of the 
leaves of the door, and he disappeared from my field of vision. An 
hour later he came back to report that the seamstress had broken a 
needle and refused to risk another. I suspended him by as much of 
a garment as he wore long enough to promise to cut off his ears, to 
have the subprefect put the seamstress in prison, and to bring down 
another earthquake upon Huancabamba unless the contract solemnly 
entered into was fulfilled before sundown; and I was not sharp-eyed 
enough to distinguish his little brown legs one from the other as he 
sped back to the zapateria. At dusk the shirt was delivered, an exact 
copy of the original, which was bequeathed to the miniature messenger. 

A diet chiefly of quinine soon had me ready for the road again. My 
load was more burdensome than ever. A long stretch of wilderness 
ahead required the carrying of many pounds of food, and on down the 
valley of the Huancabamba I wobbled like an octogenarian. Most of 
the day lay across a desert of mighty broken chasms, leprous-dry un- 
der the blazing sun, scarred, gashed, and split with scores of lines, 
almost any of which might have been mistaken for the trail. Some- 
how I chanced to pick the right one and brought up at dusk at the hut 
of Alexandro Bobbio, far up the chasm of a small tributary. 

Bobbio was a wiry man of fifty, son of an Italian, though officially 
a Peruvian, speaking only Spanish, but well-read, and of infinitely more 
industry and initiative than the natives. Unlike our own immigrants, 
those to South America retain for generations a distinct evidence of 
their origin; to the society about them they are still known as " hijos 
de italiano, aleman, ingles," and the like, and the traveler is almost cer- 
tain to find the man thus designated of far more worth than his neigh- 
bors, though commonly inferior to the race of his fathers. Bobbio 
was a government employee, stationed here in his thatched hut to 
check the cargoes of leaf tobacco that " salen pa* fuera," or pass out 
of Jaen province in large quantities for Huancabamba and the coast 
in leather-wrapped bundles on horses, mules, and cattle. Like several 

233 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

of Europe, the Peruvian government retains the monopoly of tobacco. 
For an official load of 69 kilograms it pays $10, and in some remote 
districts only $8.50. Each kilo produces twenty packages of cigarettes, 
selling for thirty centavos each ; in other words the 69 kilos bring the 
government $208 gold. This system is directly inherited from Spain 
and colonial days. Stevenson found that the King purchased tobacco 
at three reals (three-eighths of a dollar), and sold it at $2, though 
much was spent on fiscales. It remained for republican Peru to open 
a truly enormous gulf between producer and consumer. 

" I wish I could buy a burro, even a half-size one," I sighed, half to 
myself, as I was straightening up under my burden next morning. 
Had he been an unalloyed Latin-American, Bobbio would have 
shrugged his shoulders and murmured something about life being a sad 
matter at best. Instead, he cried " Why did n't you say so ? " and, 
stepping out into the sunshine flooding the arid world like a shower of 
gold, waved his arms in some local code of wigwagging at a hut hung 
high up on the desert hillside across the " river." Not long after there 
drifted up before the corredor where we sat in the shade a sun-scorched 
mestizo youth leading a small donkey, shaggy as a bear just emerging 
from his winter's den. It proved to be a female of the species, about 
sweet sixteen as donkeys go, and due in the years to come to double 
in size; moreover, she was chucaro, in other words had never yet 
contributed to the labor of the world, and appeared to the youth to 
be worth twelve soles. There ensued the usual verbal skirmish before 
we compromised at ten. Clipping an effigy of the King of England 
from my waist-band, I held it out to the mestizo. He shied at it like 
a colt at a flying newspaper. The Incas, we are told, forbade the com- 
mon people to possess gold. Whether it is due to that prohibition, 
passed down by tradition to the present day, or to mere contrariness, 
the countrymen of the Andes still insist on doing their transactions in 
silver. Indeed, " plata " is the most common word for money in all the 
region. Bobbio had no prejudice against gold, however, and taking 
ten silver " cartwheels " from a hairy cowhide chest in a far corner 
of his hut, he dropped them into the youth's outspread hands, and the 
latter sped away up the sun-flooded hillside to his hovel, leaving me in 
possession of a No. 4 size donkey and the ancient hawser with which 
it was moored to a post of Bobbio's dwelling. 

The first necessity was a name for the animal. Her startling beauty 
against the background of the Egyptian landscape made " Cleopatra " 
obvious. Then came the problem of the furniture without which 

234 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

no Andean donkey will carry even a man's load. Bobbio donated an 
old grain-sack. Over this went my poncho. Thirty centavos seemed 
a just price for a corona, a donkey " saddle " of wood of saw-buck 
shape. For another sol I became the legal possessor of a large and 
stout, if rather aged, pair of alforjas, or cloth saddle-bags, in which 
my forty pounds could be evenly balanced. Around these, donkey and 
all, Bobbio wound with the intricacy of long experience several yards 
of rope, and at blazing ten I was off at last — to have my entire worldly 
possessions immediately dash away up the hillside into a jungle. 

When they had been recovered, a nephew of Bobbio volunteered to 
pilot my new ship out of harbor. With the tow-rope and a cudgel in 
hand he got the craft under way, then gradually the cudgel sufficed 
both as rudder and throttle. A mile from home tie turned the com- 
mand over to me and away we went alone up the narrowing valley into 
the Huazcaray range, " Cleopatra " waltzing ahead of me up the slope 
like a school-girl on a holiday. It seemed ridiculous that any traveler 
with a donkey should ever have had difficulties — unless he expected a 
bag filled even in the middle to lie contentedly on the animal's back. 
With only a slight shift to one side or the other every hour or two 
the alforjas rode like a cavalryman. 

We zigzagged high over a range, coming out above what was evi- 
dently an immense valley, heaped full of white clouds as the basket of 
a plantation-picker with cotton, and began to go swiftly down through 
reddish mud ruts deeper than " Cleopatra " was high. Then we 
picked up the Tamborapo river near its source, and descended along a 
grassy valley walled by bushy hillsides. 

In this region of northern Peru, the Andes break down into great 
sweltering gorges and tropical wildernesses instead of the unbroken 
high pampas the range seems to promise. The traveler so foolish as to 
journey through it catches the valley of a river as it tears its way 
across the jungled mountain wilderness, follows it as far as possible, 
then fights his way across a divide, to descend or ascend another stream. 
Neither waterway is likely to run in anything like the direction he 
would go, but by tacking like a ship against a head wind he advances 
bit by bit, with an exertion out of all proportion to the actual progress, 
toward the nebulous goal he has set himself. The distance between 
two hamlets a hundred miles apart is often three hundred miles in this 
labyrinthian province of Jaen, officially a province of Peru, but still 
disputed by Ecuador, as the boundary was between Atahuallpa and 
Huascar at the coming of the Spaniards. So low is the region that 

235 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the local expression for entering " la Provincia," as Jaen is known 
locally, is " Va pa' dentro — to go down inside," as might be designated 
the entrance into the realms of the unrighteous departed. 

Perfection, alas, is not of this world. Now that I might have added 
a plentiful supply of foodstuffs to my pack without increasing my bur- 
dens — for " Cleopatra " had been sold under a guarantee to carry a 
hundred pounds — I had reached a section of the world where food 
is under no circumstances for sale. Furthermore, with a thousand 
miles of road just suited to donkeys behind me, it must be my fortune 
the morning after at last acquiring one to strike the worst possible 
road for them. Strictly speaking, there was no road; but for certain 
spaces trees enough had been felled to make passage through the forest 
possible, and the rainy season and tobacco-trains had combined to turn 
these clearings into unbroken miles of camelones, those corduroy-like 
ridges of hard earth with a coating of slippery mud, alternating with 
ditches of liquid mud from two to three feet deep. A pedestrian, 
even with forty pounds on his back, may trip along the tops of these 
as blithely as a youthful opera company counting the ties from Red 
Cloud to Chicago. But to attempt to drive a half-grown jackass, 
laden with all the driver's earthly possessions in far from water-proof 
cloth sacks, through mile after monotonous mile of them, under an 
endless tropical downpour, is an experience to stir the most blaze and 
world-weary soul. Those steps at which the uncomplaining little brute 
did not slip off into the ditch behind the ridge on which she had set 
her feet were those in which she fell with a still more far-reaching 
splash into the ditch ahead. Usually each pair of feet was divided in 
its allegiance, and reduced the animal to that artistic performance 
popularly known in pseudo-histrionic circles as " splitting the splits." 
More times than I could have counted, " Cleopatra " fell down length- 
wise, crosswise, frontwise, and hindwise, on her head, on the side of 
her neck, on her bedraggled tail, on every part of a donkey 
known to anatomy, showering me with mud from the crown of my 
hat to my inundated boots, soaking my possessions in seas of mud, now 
and then frankly lying down in despair, as often attempting to shirk 
her just portion of this world's troubles by dashing into the impene- 
trable dripping jungle and smashing my maltreated belongings against 
the trees. From time to time she became hopelessly entangled with a 
train of pack-animals " going outside," forcing me to wade in and lift 
her bodily, pack and all, out of some slough above which little more 
than her drooping ears were visible. In short, when this " royal high- 

236 




The main street of the great provincial capital of Jaen, with the flagpole to which I tied 
"Cleopatra" before the official residence of the local governor 




The government " ferry " across the Huancabamba, with the balseros imbibing the last 

Dutch courage before attempting to set the chasqui, or mailman, and me, 

with our baggage, across the flood-swollen stream 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

way " waded across the barnyard of the " Hacienda Charape," it did 
not require a particularly sincere invitation to cause me to spend the 
rest of the day there. 

The hacendados of this region, owning whole ranges of moun- 
tains and valleys, live scarcely better than the Indians in their hovels. 
Both father and son in this case wore shoes and read the Lima news- 
papers — from a month to six weeks old — yet their earth-floored and 
walled dining-room swarmed with unspeakably dirty peon children, and 
pigs all but uprooted the table as we ate. The slatternly female 
cooking over three stones in an adjoining sty served us boiled rice 
mixed with cubes of pork in a single bowl from which we all helped 
ourselves indifferently with spoon or fingers. Father and son slept on 
a sort of home-made table covered with a pair of ragged blankets in a 
mud den overrun by domestic animals and littered with all the noisome 
odds and ends of a South American harness-room. Yet their speech 
was as redundant with formalities as that of a Spanish cavalier in the 
king's court. 

Though I knew there was a long, foodless, and uninhabited region 
ahead, I could add but little to " Cleopatra's " nominal load in prepara- 
tion for it, for to offer to buy supplies would have been considered an 
insult to my hosts equal to an attempt to pay for my accommodation. 
Costumbre, inbred for long generations, forces these rural hacendados 
of Peru to consider it beneath their dignity to sell anything, except the 
rapadura and home-made fire-water they look upon as their legitimate 
source of income, yet they are too miserly to give much. The best I 
could do was to accept, with signs of deep gratitude, two small cotton 
sackfuls of chffles and charol; the former, bone-hard slices of plan- 
tains warranted to keep forever in any climate and taste like oak chips 
to any appetite ; the latter, hard squares of fried fat pork of the size of 
small dice. Them of course, there was the inevitable slab of crude 
sugar wrapped in banana leaves. 

The " road " was worse than that of the day before. Times without 
number I concluded the end of the journey had come for one of us, yet 
somehow the maltreated little brute sprawled forward through the 
pouring rain. Dense, dripping, unbroken forests, abounding with the 
red berries of wild coffee, crowded close on either hand. Below, the 
swollen Tamborapo roared incessantly close alongside, adding to the 
constant fear of losing all my possessions the continual dread of reach- 
ing some impassable stream. Toward the end of a day during which 
we had forded a dozen difficult tributaries, we were halted by a raging 

2 37 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

branch, plainly foolhardy to attempt. I chased " Cleopatra " up 
through the jungle alongside it, until darkness came on and forced 
us to camp in a tiny open space, my perishable possessions 4iung in 
the trees against destruction by ants, and the donkey tied to the trunk 
that formed my bed-post. All night long the animal walked round 
and round over me, though without once stepping on my prostrate 
form or the heaped-up baggage. In the morning we tore our way 
far on up the tributary before we came in sight of a " bridge," that is, 
two poles tied with vines to a tree on either bank. I had piled my gar- 
ments on top of the load and was just dragging my reluctant baggage- 
car into the stream, when a half -naked youth appeared on the opposite 
bank, making wild signs to me across the uproar of waters. By the 
time I had regained the shore, he arrived in abbreviated shirt by way 
of the " bridge," carrying a stout staff and a rope. With these he 
dragged the donkey, stripped stark naked, into the stream and, fer- 
vently crossing himself twice, fought his way with it into the torrent ; 
while I made three trips monkey-fashion along the tree-lashed poles 
with the baggage that would infallibly have been washed away but for 
this experienced jungle-dweller. His particular saint did not fail him 
and, having delivered the drenched and disgusted animal to me on the 
further bank, he accepted a real with a gratitude that suggested he con- 
sidered himself well-paid for risking his life. 

Slowly, monotonously, day after day, we pushed on through the 
Amazonian jungle — Amazonian not only in appearance, but because 
the Tamborapo, soon to join the Maranon, forms a part of the great 
network of the Father of Waters. The unpeopled forest, draped with 
vines that here and there, like broken cables, dipped their ends in the 
stream, seemed to have no end. The absolute solitude of the region, 
ever shut in by impenetrable jungle, with never a view of the horizon, 
with no sign of the existence of humanity and no other sounds than the 
occasional scream of a bird and the constant roar of the stream, had a 
peculiar effect on the moods. One felt abandoned by the world, and 
came to look upon all nature as a cruel prison-warden determined that 
his prisoner should never again be permitted to pick up the threads of 
his existence, nor even communicate with the world that had abandoned 
him. The very silence added to the gloom, until I felt like screaming, 
" Well, speak, burro ! " It was a relief not to sweat under my own 
load, but it was distinctly more laborious to drive it before me. Day 
after day I beat up " Cleopatra's " rear from dawn to dusk without a 
pause, yet covered scarcely half the distance I might have plodded 

238 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

alone. Even where the trail was level and dry, the docile, yet head- 
strong brute could not exceed two miles an hour; wherever a bit of 
slope, or stones and mud intervened, she picked her way with the 
cautious deliberation of an old lady entering a street-car. Insects 
swarmed. My unshaven face and all the expanse of skin from crown 
to toes were blotched and swollen with their visitations. The chifles 
and charol gave out and left only the lead-heavy rapadura and river- 
water as hunger antidotes. On the third day even the last chunk of 
crude sugar disappeared, and still the two of us plodded on, equally 
gaunt and lacking in ambition and energy. 

I had lived on river-water for more than twenty-four hours, and 
lost my way several times on forking trails that climbed to nowhere 
far above, or were swallowed up in the jungle, when I guessed again at 
a path that climbed up out of the valley of the river. By and by it 
sweated up to a hut of open-work poles, where lived a vaquero in 
charge of the stock of a vast hacienda of the wilderness. Only a little 
girl of eight was at home, and she did not know that roads were 
meant to lead anywhere. Tying " Cleopatra " in the shade of the 
eaves, I sat down to await adult information. Starvation seemed to 
have danced its orgy for weeks before my weary eyes when the child 
came out with a fat, ripe chirimoya, to lisp in a shaky voice, " Le gu'ta 
e'ta f ruta ? " Hours later a gaunt, tropic-scarred man appeared, and 
at sight of me shouted the stereotyped greeting of all his class to any 
visitor ahorse or afoot : 

" Apease — dismount, sefior." 

When I declined with the customary formalities, he opened pre- 
liminary inquiries as to my biography. I broke in upon them to sug- 
gest food. 

" Entra y descansa, sefior," he replied, " Sientese." 

The rural Peruvian would invite one to enter and take a seat — on a 
block of wood — if he came to put out a fire. He produced a glass 
made from a broken bottle and insisted on my partaking of his hos- 
pitality to the extent of drinking his health in the aguardiente into 
which he turned his sugar-cane in a little thatched distillery down in a 
hollow nearby. But my every hint of a desire to buy food was diplo- 
matically ignored, except that he accepted readily enough a real, and 
sent the child " upstairs " ; that is, to crawl up to and along the reed 
ceiling, to fetch me a leaf-wrapped chunk of rapadura. 

The invisible trail he pointed out pitched down a leg-straining and 
almost perpendicular bajada of loose stones to another stream, then 

239 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

struggled breathlessly upward through unbroken forest over the Gua- 
ranguia " range," a jungled mountain spur, from the crest of which 
there spread out before me the vast panorama of an upper-Amazon 
hoya, the Tamborapo far below squirming away through its steep 
dense-wooded valley; and all about it half-barren hills of varying 
colors that gave the landscape the appearance of a tempestuous sea 
turned to jungle earth. Red cliffs, like our western buttes, flashed 
their faces in the sunset, and as far as the eye could reach in any di- 
rection was no sign that man had ever before entered this trackless 
wilderness. 

It was nearing dusk when the world fell away before us into a great 
wooded quebrada, its bottom unfathomable, but with a trail in plain 
sight fighting its way up the opposite slope. The path underfoot 
melted away, and where " Cleopatra " led, I followed, certain she knew 
the way as well as I. The ghost of a trail she had chosen turned to a 
perpendicular cowpath down which the animal sprawled and stumbled, 
bumping her load against the trees, but unable to fall far through the 
dripping forest that grew up impenetrably about us. Dense, black 
night found us at the bottom of a V-shaped valley. I sought the cor- 
responding path on the opposite side of its small stream by feeling 
with both feet and hands, but it was as intangible as the " straight 
and narrow path " of theological phraseology. To cheer things on, 
it began to rain in deluges. I made the most of a genuinely Peruvian 
situation by halting for the night where there was at least drinking- 
water. So sharp was the valley that there was not even a flat space 
large enough to stretch out, and I could only curl up in the muddy 
path that had brought us to this sad pass, tumbling my soaked baggage 
somewhere beside me and tying the exhausted animal to something 
in the dark, where there was neither a leaf to eat nor a spot for the 
brute to lie down in. 

By morning light I found that " Cleopatra's " inexperience and 
asinine judgment had led us to a place where wild cattle came to drink, 
and we were forced to struggle back to the crest of the hill, and descend 
again by another trail that linked up with the one we had seen the after- 
noon before. At its foot was a field of swamp-grass, in which the 
starving animal spent the rest of the morning in regaining strength for 
the climb ahead. Above, a new style of landscape spread out before 
us. A vast, bushy plain was passable only by following the windings 
of a sandy and stony river-bed, and wading with monotonous frequency 
the stream that swung back and forth across it, like a person utterly 

240 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

devoid of a sense of direction or power of decision. Beyond, we 
tramped monotonously on through endless chaparral, thorn-bristling, 
bushy woods where reigned an utter solitude only enhanced by the 
mournful cry of some unseen bird. The most constantly recurring 
form of vegetation was the tusho, a sort of cottonwood tree with a 
trunk swollen as a gormand's waist-line. Endlessly this dismal wil- 
derness stretched onward from dawn to dark, until the traveler could 
fancy himself in solitary confinement for life, and in danger of losing 
the mind for which he could find no employment. The region would 
have been more endurable had I been able to stride forward at my own 
pace; but "Cleopatra" sentenced me to a monotonous, unchanging 
snail's gait that gave sufficient exercise only to my right arm and the 
cudgel it bore. Hundreds of red centipedes littered the ground; the 
dead, dry silence was broken only by the rhythmic mournful cry of a 
jungle bird. But here the going was smooth, and for long distances 
our pace was so unbroken that there ran through my unoccupied mind 
for hours at a time the paraphrase of an old refrain: 

" Two jacks with but a single gait; 
Six feet that walk* as one." 

Next to the tusho, the tree that most often repeated itself was the 
guaba, producing a fruit like large brown beanpods filled with black 
seeds, the white pulp of which had thirst-quenching qualities and a 
taste mildly resembling the water-melon. 

I had lost account of days entirely, but subsequent checking up 
proved it was a Sunday afternoon when I halted at the " Hacienda 
Shumba " and, spreading out my mouldy garments on the thatch roof 
of its only hut, awaited the owner. He proved to be the teniente 
gobernador, the lieutenant-governor of the region, in the sun-bleached 
remnants of two garments and a hat. Having turned " Cleopatra " 
into a pasture, he settled down to spell out the documents I presented. 
Strictly speaking, he was not the hacienda owner, but only an " arren- 
datario." Though I had not suspected it, I had been traveling for 
days through estates which, as beneficencias or cofardias, belong to 
the bishopric of Trujillo, and it is partly the heavy hand of the Church 
that keeps this region so solitary and uninhabited. The so-called" 
owners are really agents who administer them for the tonsured land- 
lords, collecting a rental from the few families who raise a bit of rice, 
cacao, and cattle. The region is far less rich than it is locally reputed. 
The soil of the river-valleys is fertile, but the mountains are rocky and 
often arid and, especially in this section, poorly served by the rains. 

241 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

A government official himself, my host complained bitterly against 
the government tax on tobacco, liquor, sugar, salt, and matches. The 
first, he asserted, was no longer worth planting. All non-Peruvians 
were " gringos " to the teniente gobernador. A fellow-countryman 
of mine, he asserted, had spent a night with him recently — hardly two 
years before. He was — let 's see — an Italian ; no, a German. 
Though he could read and write, laboriously, and had long been a 
government official — on compulsion and without emoluments — the 
world, as he conceived it, consisted of Peru and another very much 
smaller country, with several towns of more or less the same size and 
conditions as the two villages of Jaen and Tocabamba he had seen, 
named Germany, Italy, Estados Unidos, and so on, from which came 
the various types of " gringos." 

Indeed, he wished to know, " Is Germany in the same country as 
the United States ? " 

" What do you call a native of Jaen ? " I chanced to ask him in the 
course of our conversation. 

" A Jaense, to be sure," he replied. " Just as you call a native of 
Italy an italiano, or a man from the town named France a frances." 
But if his knowledge was slight, it was no less tenacious, and he 
could no more be talked out of his geographical conceptions than out 
of his conviction that all the world lives in reed-and-mud huts with 
earth floors, goes habitually barefoot, and considers its dwellings fit 
breed-places for guinea-pigs. When I asked him if the road beyond 
Jaen was good, I was startled to hear the assurance : 
" Ah, yes, indeed. There are no bad roads in Peru ! " 
A divan of reeds, set into the mud wall of the single room and cov- 
ered with a hairy cowhide, was quite soft enough as a bed for one who 
had long since left effeminate civilization behind. Until long after 
dark we two men and a woman squatted in home-made chairs fitting to 
a doll's house, and fed ourselves over our knees. Yet the conventions 
of society are quite as fixed in these hovels of the wilderness as in 
any palace of aristocracy. It was quite a la mode, a sign of good 
breeding, in fact, to ask for a second helping of the bean and yuca 
stew — which is invariably served so boiling hot that even the expe- 
rienced " gringo's " teeth suffer — but under no circumstances for a 
third. When they had been emptied a second time, the gourd bowls 
were piled up on the floor in a corner, to be washed when the spirit 
moved, and, as if at a signal that there was no second course, the one 
glass in the house, tied together with a string and evidently regarded as 

242 



THE WILDS OF NORTHERN PERU 

a great treasure and heirloom, was filled with irrigating-ditchwater and 
passed around the circle, beginning with the guest. The feeble imita- 
tion of a candle soon flickered out, and by eight we were all scattered 
along the walls of the hut on our reed divans, quarreling pigs shaking 
the house as they jostled against it, and the rain that fell heavily all 
night long dripping upon us here and there through the thatched roof. 
" Cleopatra " was so nearly rendido — " bushed " — next morning 
that, even under her slight load, she wabbled drunkenly and kept her 
footing chiefly because the heavy, glue-like mud clung to our feet like 
pedestals to a statue. For one considerable space the way led through 
a swamp, where I was several times forced to wade knee-deep to carry 
out the load and lift the bemired animal to her feet. Yet drinkable 
water was not to be had, and the choking tropical humidity was the 
more tantalizing as rain broke every few minutes, and everything in 
sight was dripping wet, though the sandy soil swallowed each shower 
as it fell. Toward noon the now considerable trail split, marking an 
important parting of the way ; for the branch to the left leads quickly 
down to Bellavista on the bank of the Maraiion, whence rafts descend 
to Iquitos and the rubber country, and so by the Amazon to the At- 
lantic, while I, bearing to the right, plodded on along the highlands of 
the Andes. In the dead-silent woods a few decrepit and weather- 
blackened huts grew up, several drowsy, half-naked beings in human 
form gazing languidly after me from the doorways, and before I knew 
it I was treading the streets of the provincial capital and " city " of 
Jaen. 



243 



CHAPTER X 

APPROACHING INCA LAND 

SMALL wonder that the traveler who has splashed and waded a 
long week through the mournful wilderness, living chiefly on 
fond hopes salted with the anticipations of an unschooled im- 
agination, and washed down with river water, should fetch up in Jaen 
with a decided shock. Occupying a large and distinct place on the 
map, this provincial " capital " proved to be a disordered cluster of a 
half-hundred wretched, time-blackened, tumble-down, thatched huts, 
the roofs full of holes, the gables often missing, scattered like aban- 
doned junk among the weeds and bushes of a half-hearted clearing in 
the selfsame gloomy forest and spiny jungle that had so long shut me 
in. The barefoot, half-clothed, fever-yellow inhabitants of mongrel 
breed stared curiously from their mud doorways as I stalked past, 
smeared with dried mud from head to foot, sunburned, shaggy with 
whiskers, and dragging behind me by main force an emaciated donkey 
trembling with excitement at the unwonted sights, or with fear at the 
unknown dangers of so vast a metropolis. From one hut in no way 
different from its neighbors issued the city school, the " teacher " with 
a ragged cap on his head and a drooping cigarette smouldering between 
his lips, to stare after me with the rest. Every building in town, the 
church included, consisted of a single mud room with an unleveled 
earth floor, windowless, and with a small reed or pole door giving en- 
trance, exit, and such air and light as could force admittance. The 
" government palace," before which I tied " Cleopatra " to the of- 
ficial bamboo flagpole in the geographical center of the capital, was 
closed. With a flourish of my papers I summoned the " authorities " 
to step forward and make themselves known ; but the manoeuver 
brought only the information that the subprefect was " away for a 
few days, but he '11 soon be back, next week, no mas, or the week after, 
at any rate. Entra y descansa — come in and sit down." 

The gobernador was likewise among the indefinitely missing ; whence 
the mantle of power descended upon the shoulders of the alcalde. 
That worthy was soon produced, somewhat the worse for concentrated 
cane-juice, but remarkable for at least two features, — that he wore 

244 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

what might still with some stretch of veracity be called shoes, and 
alone of all the town could have passed for a white man, had he seen 
fit to remove a stringy little Indian mustache. When he had read 
aloud to the congregated male population all my credentials in Spanish 
— a task not unlike that of a one-legged man walking without his 
crutches after spraining his ankle and suffering a stone-bruise — he 
requested me to name my desires. They were modest, — room, bed, 
table, chair, water, food for myself and pasture for the other one of 
us until day after to-morrow. Slowly and bit by bit, but none the less 
surely, my requirements were met. A key was found that manipulated 
the creaking padlock of one of the thatched mud-caves with sagging 
reed divans around its walls. A crippled table was dragged in, and 
a squad of soldiers sent for old newspapers to cover it. In due time, 
and with the assistance of the entire population in a house to house 
canvass, a gourd wash-basin was discovered, then a gourd with a hole 
in one end, from which one drank and into which the half-Indian boy 
thrust a finger to carry it, after filling it at the chocolate-brown stream 
at the edge of the town; a chair was unofficially subtracted from the 
government palace and, last of all, a four-inch mirror was pinned to 
the mud wall. I had barely removed the hirsute adornment of a week 
by such light as Jaen, massed in and about the door, left me, when a 
barefoot female glided noiselessly into my den and, announcing herself 
the owner, carried off the glass as too precious a possession to be long 
out of her sight. 

The first stroll disclosed the hitherto unsuspected fact that several 
of the mud-dens were shops. One of them posed as a restaurant, but 
its restorative powers were at best anemic. Jaen is probably the hottest, 
and certainly the hungriest, provincial capital in Peru. To retain its 
rank as a " city," it fulfilled nominally the test as a place where bread 
is made, — a tiny, soggy bun selling for the price of an American loaf. 
Milk and fruit, which might easily have been superabundant here, 
were unknown luxuries, and the customary food of the populace in- 
cluded nothing a wellbred dog would have touched in any but a 
ravenous state. A dozen of us without families, including the alcalde, 
were dependent upon the " restaurant," and we agreed upon a fixed 
ration of bread and eggs, the supply of which never approached even 
the normal demand. But the alcalde quickly formed the habit of 
sneaking over before the hour set and, by virtue of his official powers, 
consuming most of the provender. To forestall him, the rest of us took 
to arriving earlier, until it grew customary to appear for the noonday 

245 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

meal at about nine, and to sit down to supper toward three, eyeing each 
other ravenously, and jealously watching the cook's every movement. 
He who is accustomed to complain of the " high cost of living " should 
try the antidote of a journey down the Andes, where the high cost 
reigns supreme, without the living. In these languid corners of the 
world where life is reduced to its lowest terms food and lodging assume 
the first place of importance, and the mind is never free from these 
primitive apprehensions ; no sooner does one eat than the worry arises 
as to where the next meal will come from, as each day's pleasure on 
the road is tempered by wondering what hardship the night will have 
in store. 

There were some evidences of negro blood in Jaen, though that of 
the aboriginal Indian tribe of the region was universal, in the percent- 
age of one half to a far smaller fraction in varying individuals. The 
men wore home-made garments of the cheapest cotton, patched and 
sun-faded, generally no shirt, with merely a kerchief knotted about the 
neck above the undershirt, and sombreros de junco, hats woven of a 
species of swamp-grass or reeds, which a few weeks of sun and rain 
gave the appearance of a badly thatched roof. The women wore 
no hats, combed their raven-black hair flat and smooth, without adorn- 
ments, and let it hang down their backs in a single braid. Like all the 
cholas and half-castes of the sex in the Andes, they dragged their mis- 
shapen skirts constantly in the mire of the streets and the " floors " 
of their huts, and were habitually even less cleanly in their habits than 
the men. The stage of education may be gaged from the fact that the 
government telegraph operator assured me I could not reach Cerro 
de Pasco by land, but must " cross the sea " to Lima and take the rail- 
road from there. Jaen's chief pastime for speeding up the monotonous 
stretch between the cradle and the grave is the consumption of the 
native " canazo," and only those who rose early were likely to find a 
completely sober man. A sort of harmless anarchy reigned. A man 
merry with cane-juice might sit outside the mud school-house and keep 
school from " functioning " all day long, without interference. An 
amorous youth, going on a drunken rampage among the huts or the 
washerwomen on the banks of the irrigating ditch, was avoided if 
possible, but was never forcibly restrained. As is frequent in tropical 
towns, there was little evidence of religion, pseudo or otherwise, which 
thrives best in the high, cold regions of the mysterious paramos. The 
mud church, with its tower melted off* unevenly at the top, like a half- 
burned candle in a wind, had long since lost its cura, and served now as 

246 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

provincial jail, by the simple addition of a few poles set in adobe across 
the door and a few languid soldiers lolling in the general vicinity 
whenever they had no particular desire to be somewhere else. 

On the afternoon of my arrival the rumor floated languidly over 
the town that the weekly cow was to be butchered next morning, but 
it was denied later in the evening. I made the most of my day of lei- 
sure by acquiring a bar of native soap, of the appearance of a mud-pie 
and the scent of boiling glue, and spending some two hours in the 
irrigating ditch, stringing across the main street, from a telegraph pole 
to a rafter of " my house," all the garments that could be spared from 
use in an unexacting society. Nothing was more certain than that I 
should start again at daylight of the second morning — until news ar- 
rived that the river eighteen miles south was impassable until the 
waters receded. It was evident, too, that I must deny myself the com- 
panionship of " Cleopatra." She hung wilted and dejected in the 
town pasture, and at best there was no hope that she would last many 
days further, even if there were, any means of getting her across the 
swollen river. I accepted the alcalde's offer of $3 for the animal and 
her " furniture," and felt a glow of satisfaction, tempered with regret 
at the loss of a good companion, for all her faults, that I should no 
longer have to drag my feet behind me at her snail's pace, and be de- 
pendent on my right arm for advancement. 

On the morning I should have started, the rumor again ran riot 
that the town was going to pelar un res — "peel a beef." This time 
matters went so far as to lead the octogenarian victim out into the main 
street, where the population gathered in an attitude of anticipation, a 
dozen or more armed with home-made axes and knives, the rest with 
pots and gourds. For a long time the languid hubbub of some dis- 
cussion rose and fell about the downcast animal. Then gradually the 
gathering disintegrated and scattered to its huts, each pausing at sight 
of a face, to drone in that singularly indifferent monotone of the 
tropics, " No hay carne hoy " — (there is no meat to-day). Some mis- 
anthropist, an agent of a neighboring hacienda, it turned out, had 
offered $9 for the animal, and Jaen did not feel justified in squander- 
ing any such fortune for mere food. My rosy dream of again tasting 
fresh meat and of carrying supplies on my journey was once more 
rudely dissipated. 

The east was blushing from the first kiss of the bold, tropical sun 
when I sallied forth on the morning I had concluded to start, river or 
no river, and went to wake up the " restaurant " keeper, sleeping on his 

247 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

dining-table with the precious bread-box under his head. The alcalde 
appeared almost at the same instant from the direction of the irrigation 
ditch, his towel about his neck. He greeted me with forced courtesy. 
His solemn promise to arrange to have my baggage transported to the 
river in consideration for the low price at which he had acquired 
" Cleopatra " had gone the way of most South American promises — 
into thin air. Now I reminded him of it, he would order a soldier to 
accompany me at once. The earth swung a long way eastward on its 
axis without any other sign of activity. Then some one came to say 
that a soldier would not be sent, because Anastasio Centurion, return- 
ing to his " Hacienda Algarrobo " forthwith, would be delighted to 
carry my belongings on his mule. An hour later he declined to carry 
them, then he was prevailed upon by his compadre, the lieutenant- 
governor, to renew his offer ; then he again concluded the weight was 
too great, and finally sent an urchin for my saddle-bags. Before they 
were loaded, however, a dispute broke out over the ownership of a 
" silver" spur that had been picked up in the sand of the main street, 
and the town followed the alcalde to the mud hut that served as court 
of justice. It was also the city bakery, and the wife of the justice, 
who had put off baking the morning before, and was not yet mixing 
the dough, ceded a corner of the kitchen table to the court, which in 
the course of an hour settled the case in the customary Latin-American 
way — by deciding that the disputed property should remain " in the 
hands of justice." 

A soldier was at length sent to round up one of the donkeys grazing 
in the main plaza. Gradually the disgusted animal was fitted with my 
former donkey-furniture, amid the contrary suggestions of the pop- 
ulace, and the alcalde furnished me an order to the ferrymen at the 
river to set me across in the name of the government — and to return 
donkey and aparejo. A winding, narrow, stony path, that wet its feet 
at the very outset, squirmed away through the desert-like forest. 
" Down there," said Anastasio, wrapped gloomily in his maroon 
poncho and viciously kicking the spur on one bare heel into the side 
of his heavily-laden animal, " is the camino real, pero da mucha vuelta." 
How it could " give more turns " than the one we were following, it 
was hard to imagine. My pack-animal this time was a matron of 
forty, comparatively speaking, and correspondingly set in her ways. 
Within the first mile " se me escapo," as the natives have it ; that is, 
she suddenly bolted into the thorny wilderness at the first suggestion 
of an opening, and left me dripping with sweat and speckled with the 

248 




A woman of the jungles of Jaen preparing me the first meal in days at the typical Ecuadorian 
cook-stove. She declined to pose for her picture and is watching me dust the kodak 




Peruvian prisoners earn their own livelihood by weaving hats, spinning yarn, and the like. 

As in the debtors' prisons of Dickens' day, the whole family may go to jail to 

live with the imprisoned head of the household 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

blood of a dozen superficial lacerations before I again laid hands on 
her in an impassable clump of brambles and cactus. Anastasio tied 
her tow-rope to his saddle, and for an hour or so she seemed completely 
resigned to her fate. But evidently there is no trusting the sex at that 
age. No sooner was she paroled than she bolted again, and led me a 
skin-gashing chase of several miles through a wild and waterless 
solitude. Yet, after all, manipulating a donkey is a splendid ap- 
prenticeship for dealing with Latin- Americans ; no better training 
could be suggested for the prospective salesman south of the Rio 
Grande. 

The going ranged from quebradita to muy quebrada, now along the 
stony bed of a meandering " river," yesterday all but impassable, to- 
day so bone dry there was only a bit of running mud to quench the 
thirst; now over a sharp knoll bristling with jagged, loose stones. 
At red-hot noon we reached the Huancabamba river, now grown 
to man's estate, where it swings around to join the Marahon and 
divides the never-to-be-forgotten Province of Jaen from that of Cu- 
tervo. A laborious two hours up it brought us to the long-heralded 
Puerto Sauce, where the government maintains a " ferry," — five small 
logs bound together with vines and manned by three balseros housed 
in two reed-kennels. Here we squatted out the day, watching the 
coffee-colored stream race by on its long journey to the Atlantic with 
all the impetuosity of the rainy season. The government chasqui had 
been sitting here nearly a week, his mail-sacks stacked and his horse 
tethered close at hand. Only out on the extreme edge of the bank, 
where an occasional breath of tepid breeze tempered the lead-heavy 
heat and thinned the swarms of stinging insects, was life endurable. 
My skin was a patchwork of mementoes of all the minute fauna of the 
past week, and an itching like the constant prick of myriad red-hot 
needles was relieved only briefly by each dip in the stream. During 
one of them I advanced well into the river, and it seemed I could have 
crossed it ; that even the Peruvians might have made the passage, had 
they male blood in their veins. But then, had they been men they 
would long since have built a bridge. All through the night there kept 
running through my head, amid the sweep of the waters, that illuminat- 
ing remark of " Kim," " A sahib is always tied to his baggage " ; and 
in my half-conscious condition I resolved when morning broke to cast 
away all but a loin-cloth and a hat, and travel henceforth in comfort 
al uso del pais. But, alas, the least formal of us cannot rid himself of 
all the adjuncts of civilization ; and there was photography, to say noth- 

249 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

ing of food and covering for the highlands ahead, to be considered. 
When dawn turned its matter-of-fact light upon the scene, the dream 
quickly faded and I settled down to watch another day drag by into 
the past tense beside the racing brown waters of the Huancabamba. 
The feeling was rampant that nature had played me a scurvy trick. I 
had bargained on following the cool and pleasant crest of the Andes, 
and they had crumbled away beneath me and forced upon me this un- 
sought experience of the tropics. 

Not until the morning of the third day did the balseros conclude to 
attempt to pass over the " government people," — the mail-man and this 
impatient gringo with the official order from the alcalde. The raft 
had been dragged well up-stream, where we waded to it through brist- 
ling jungle and knee-deep mud. The chasqui's horse, long experienced 
in these matters from years of carrying the mails over this route, was 
driven in and forced to swim to a sand-bar well out in the stream. For 
a long time the animal stood like a prisoner at bay against the shout- 
ing and stoning and shaking of cudgels of those on the bank, but at 
length, seeing no other escape, it set out to attempt the main branch. 
Its brute instinct would have proved a better guide than the opinions of 
more rational beings. Struggling until its snorting echoed back from 
the surrounding jungle, it fought the brown, racing waters, gradually 
nearing the further bank, yet swept even more swiftly along by the 
inexorable stream, amid foam-caps from the rocky passes above, 
strained savagely to reach the strip of beach that served as landing- 
place until, swept past it without gaining a footing, it seemed suddenly 
to give up in despair, and only its head, swinging slowly round and 
round with the current, was seen a short minute more, tiny against 
the race of the yellower waters, before it swept on out of sight down 
the jungle- walled torrent. 

The chasqui gazed after the lost animal for a long moment, shrugged 
his shoulders with the resigned " Vaya ! " of a confirmed fatalist, and 
took his seat beside me on our baggage, tied securely near the back 
of the frail craft. The three brown balseros, naked but for palm-leaf 
hats and a strip of rag between their legs, each crossed himself elabo- 
rately, and took a deep draught at Anastasio's quart bottle of caiiazo. 
Then they pointed the nose of the raft up-stream, pushed off, snatched 
up their clumsy paddles with a hoarse imploration to the Virgin, and 
fought for dear life and the sand-bar. This gained, we disembarked 
and manoeuvered to the further side, then pushed off into the main 
stream. It snatched at us like some greedy monster. The sand-bar 

250 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

raced away up-stream at express speed, the further bank sped past like 
a blurred cinematograph ribbon, the paddlers, urged on by their own 
and the mail-man's raucous shouts and imprecations, battled as with 
some mortal enemy, stabbing their paddles in swift, breathless succes- 
sion into the brown stream, and following each dig with a savage jerk 
that tore the wound wide open and brought out the lean muscles be- 
neath their dingy skins like steel cables under leather coverings. The 
rules of caste are more important than life itself in South America, 
and both the mail-man and I had been refused paddles. Relentlessly 
the further shore galloped by. The bit of clearing required for land- 
ing approached, beckoned to us tantalizingly, flashed on, and the raft 
sped swiftly after the lost horse. The balseros, abetted by the chasqui, 
increased their efforts to a screaming uproar, in which I caught here 
and there a fragmentary " 'nta Virgen . . . 'yuda ! " Fortunately they 
did not put all their trust in superhuman assistance, and their paddles 
tore at the stream with a viciousness that drenched us with its after- 
math. Bit by bit we strained nearer the hurrying wall of verdure. 
Every lunge seemed to lift the paddlers into the air ; the cords on their 
necks stood out like creepers on a forest tree; their yells, hoarse and 
savage enough to have frightened off any malignant spirit of the 
waters, came strained and broken now, from lack of breath. Now we 
could all but touch the racing forest- wall. I snatched in vain at a 
sapling bowing its head in the stream. With a last faint gasp and a 
spent stroke, the balseros dropped their paddles on the raft, and all five 
of us grasped at the vegetation that tore and lacerated us in its struggle 
to escape our desperate embrace. When we had each gathered an 
armful of it, we clung so stoutly to this last hold to earth that the raft 
was all but swept from under us before we swung it up into a bit of 
cove, where the balseros, falling at once into their racial apathy, 
drooped like wilted rags at the bow, while one of them panted weakly, 
" A little more, senores, and we were gone sin noticias." 

As lazily as they had been energetic in the crossing, the ferry-men 
coaxed the raft up along the edge of the forest to the little clearing, 
where I swung my saddle-bags over a shoulder, waded to dry land 
and plodded on along the blazing hot bank of the Huancabamba. 
Slowly my shadow crawled from under my feet. In this sweltering 
desert valley, now staggering through hot sand and a dwarf vegetation 
savage with thorns, now clambering constantly over steep headlands 
that broke into cliffs at the river's edge and stumbling down again 
through veritable quarries of loose stones, my burden, augmented with 

251 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

chancaca, a sack of rice and a roll of sun-dried beef, as well as the 
lead-heavy tropical sun that seemed to lean physically on my shoul- 
ders, became unbearable. I resolved to pitch camp in the first open 
space and wait, till doomsday if necessary, for some pack-train sus- 
ceptible to the glitter of silver coins. Puerto Sauce was probably not 
more than seven miles behind me when I found, between trail and river, 
a narrow sand-strip sloping down to the racing brown waters and 
backed by a barren, stony cliff-face over which the " road " prom- 
ised to bring out in relief against the turqui sky anyone who might 
pass my way. 

Grass could not find sustenance on this sun-baked spot, but centi- 
pedes and a score of other venomous things might exist. Scattered 
along the bank were many sapling poles, the wreckage, evidently, of 
some hut that had been swept here by the raging river. I gathered an 
armful of these and laid their ends on two small logs, covered them 
with such brush and branches as were without thorns, and had a far 
more comfortable couch than the wealthiest hacendado of the region. 
Over me hung a wild lemon-tree, the fruit of which made the yellow 
Huancabamba more nearly drinkable. About its trunk, within instant 
reach, I strapped my revolver, and lay down almost in the " royal high- 
way," fully prepared for anything except a sudden burst of rain. 
Across the river in dense, half-cultivated, greener jungle were the huts 
of several natives ; but they might as well have been in another world, 
for I could not have heard a whisper above the roar of the Huanca- 
bamba had they stood on the opposite bank screaming across at me. I 
possessed a maltreated copy of Prescott, and there is great compensa- 
tion for the hardships of the trail in golden moments snatched like 
this; for nowhere does the mind grip the printed page so firmly as at 
the end of a day on the road, after long turning the leaves of no other 
page than nature's. 

The afternoon passed, faded to a violent sunset, and blackened into 
night, without a human sight or sound. I took another swim, careful 
not to lose my grasp on the shore, and turned my lounge into a bed. 
There had been many rumors of bears and " tigers " in these parts. 
The real peril was the incitement to suicide caused by the swarming 
insect life whenever the breeze failed for an instant. In my dreams 
the roar of the Huancabamba turned to that of New York, and I 
fancied I had suddenly left off my journey down the Andes to run 
home for a single day, at the end of which I should take up my task 
where I had left off. 

252 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

When dawn awoke me I refused to rise. But hour after hour passed 
without a break in the drear monotony of the arid landscape. In mid- 
morning patience exploded and, throwing my load over a shoulder, I 
toiled on. When, at the end of some fifteen miles, my legs refused to 
push me further, I struggled through the jungle to the river-bank; but 
there was not a cleared space sufficient to sit on, much less to lie down 
in. By wading chest-deep I reached the breezy nose of an island in the 
Huancabamba, and made my bed on the damp beach-sand. But I 
had chosen poorly, if choice it might be called. Without even leaves 
to spread under me, the night was one of unmitigated torture. My- 
riads of crawling, stinging tropical life made my entire frame a pas- 
ture and playground, and at best I got only a few half-conscious 
snatches of sleep, troubled with the threatening rumble of the river. 
For safety's sake I had hung many of my belongings in the branches 
of trees; but not enough of them. Daylight showed a populous 
colony of enormous black ants in possession of all that lay on the 
ground. They had not only eaten to the last crumb the chancaca I 
had lugged for two blazing days, and left me barely a spoonful of rice 
for breakfast, but they had all but destroyed the home-made cover 
of my kodak, had decorated my hat with a fringe, and had bitten into 
a dozen pieces my auto-photographic bulb, scattering all the vicinity 
with crumbs of red rubber. 

Another lone day we struggled up-stream. I say we, — that is, my- 
self and I ; for — a point for psychologists — since taking up my own 
load again I could not rid myself of the fancy that I was two dis- 
tinct persons, one of whom was forcing the other to make the journey, 
In the night I often started up fancying the other fellow — the one 
who did the walking and carried the load — had escaped. Could he 
know the truth beforehand, no sane man would sentence himself to 
tramp this route of the Andes, to suffer almost incessant hardships, the 
monotony of the same experiences over and over again, the dreary in- 
tercourse with a people so stupid, so low of intelligence that long con- 
tact with their childish minds brings with it the danger of one's own 
faculties turning childish, like that of a lifetime of school-teaching. 
Only the American habit of carrying out to the bitter end a plan once 
made could force him on. 

Late the next morning the most exciting event of several days hap- 
pened, — I met a human being. He was lolling before a slatternly hut 
of reeds, inside which a half-caste woman squatted on the earth peeling 
camotes. On such a journey the civilized traveler unconsciously builds 

253 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

up a certain pity for himself which he feels should be shared 
by others. But he is sure of a rude awakening among these clod-like 
inhabitants of the wilderness. Should a living skeleton crawl into an 
Andean hut announcing he had not tasted food for a fortnight, had 
seven species of tropical fever, and had been bitten by a baker's dozen 
of venomous serpents, the greeting would be the same motionless, in- 
different grunt and drowsily mumbled " Vaya ! " with which this female 
acknowledged my presence. No offer of money would have brought 
her to her feet, much less have induced her to cook one of the chickens 
— or even yellow curs — that overran the place. As I picked up my 
burden in disgust, however, she murmured through her half-closed 
lips, " Se ira uste' almorzando? " — in other words that I might wait, if 
I chose, to partake of the camote stew she was lazily concocting 
over the stick fire in the center of the floor. On the surface this 
stereotyped invitation looks like genuine hospitality. At bottom it is 
less so than a habit, tinged with superstition and fear of malignant 
spirits, and above all the impossibility of an uninitiative race daring 
to, or even thinking of varying a custom of all their known world. It 
was no time to stand on my dignity, however, even had the foodless 
days behind left me any such support, and I sat down again. A rav- 
enous two hours dragged by before the mess of native roots and 
herbs met the approval of the expressionless female, who tasted a 
wooden spoonful of it now and then and tossed the residue back 
into the kettle. Several peons had drifted in, genuine human clods, 
apparently as devoid of intelligence as the hogs rooting about under 
their hoofed feet, and gathered about a flat log raised a bit above the 
earth. With a steaming calabash of the tasteless, red-hot stew be- 
fore each of us, and a single bowl of mote mixed with bits of pork 
rind into which all shovelled at once, we finished the meal in utter 
silence. Then the first peon, wiping his horny hand across his mouth 
with a disgusting sucking sound, mumbled " Dios se lo pagara," a 
formula repeated by each as we rose to our feet. However much he 
may prefer to liquidate the matter himself, rather than to leave it to so 
uncertain and unindebted a source, this " God will pay you for it," is 
the only return the traveler who sits in at their tasteless repasts can 
force upon these mongrel people of the Andean wilderness. 

How far out of my course I had mounted the Huancabamba when I 
picked up a rock-strewn tributary along the cliff- face, only a pro- 
fessional geographer could say. Through the hot-lands of northern 
Peru direction yields to the accidents of nature, and Jaen had been as 

254 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

far east of a line due southward as Ayavaca had been to the west. 
When early sunset fell in the bottom of the deep valley, I had 
mounted several hundred feet above the level of the Huancabamba, and 
with a welcome coolness came more human manners, heralding the 
highlands again. Both Fructuoso Carrera and his far younger, though 
no less cheery wife, treated me more like a prodigal son than as an im- 
portunate guest who had fallen upon them out of the unknown. 
Amid the culinary operations suited to my case they gave me in detail 
the recipe of the choclo tandas — Quichua bread, probably used before 
the Conquest — that finally rounded off our repast late in the evening. 
For the benefit of housewives permit me to pass on the information: 

Cut off the kernels of green corn while still small and fairly soft. 
Crush them to a pulp — under a round stone on a broad flat one out 
beneath the thatched eaves, if it is desired to keep the local color intact 
— sprinkling water lightly on the mass from time to time. When the 
whole has been reduced to a somewhat adhesive dough, wrap in corn- 
husks rolls of the stuff about the size and shape of an ear of corn 
and tie with strips of husk. Sit down on the earth floor in a corner of 
the hut — driving off the persistent guinea-pigs with any weapon 
at hand — and drop these packages one by one into a kettle of boiling 
water supported by three stones. Let boil from twenty minutes to a 
half hour — depending on the energy with which fagots have been 
gathered during the day — taking care that none of" the gaunt curs 
prowling about between the legs of the cook and through other un- 
expected openings thrust their noses into the kettle, as they would be 
sure to be burned. Those who succeed in beginning the task while 
daylight still lingers should also beware any of the family chickens 
climbing to a convenient shoulder and springing into the pot, as this 
would result, not in choclo tanda, but in choclo tanda con gallina, which 
is a far more expensive dish. Zest is added by a successful attempt 
surreptitiously to get into one's saddle-bags a couple of the choclo 
tandas for the land of starvation that is expected ahead. 

Several times during the night I descended to alleviate my insect- 
bitten skin by a plunge in the clear, cold mountain stream that sounds 
in the Carrera family ears 365 days a year. In the morning I was 
forced to dress under my poncho, with far less convenience than in 
an upper Pullman berth ; for la sefiora was already grinding coffee for 
my desayuno on the flat stone under the eaves beside me. To my 
diplomatically framed question as to what I owed him, Don Fructuoso 
replied : 

255 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

"For what should you owe us anything?" 

All that day the trail, wandering back and forth across the rock- 
boiling " river," first by little thatched pachachacas, or earth-covered 
pole-bridges, then, as the stream dwindled, by precarious stepping- 
stones, climbed ever higher, at times through stretches of mud where 
dense overhanging forests had retained the rainfall. Mankind grew 
more frequent in this more habitable, rising world. Thatched cottages 
were tucked away here and there in forty-five-degree patches of 
bananas and coffee, and the pilfering of the tandas to weigh down my 
load proved an entirely gratuitous felony. 

The very air of Tablabamba, where I slept on dried cane-pulp in an 
unwalled trapiche hung well up the side of the new constricted valley, 
as humid and green as Jaen Province had been desert-brown and 
arid, teemed with stories of robbers and assassins among the moun- 
tain defiles ahead. The only visible danger I encountered, however, 
was the notorious " Sal-si-puedes — Climb it if you can," the terrors 
of which had grown daily more persistent for a fortnight past. This 
was one of those endless zigzags by which Andean trails climb from 
one river system, when near its source, to another, revealing its ne- 
farious purpose only bit by bit, and subtly enticing the traveler ever up- 
ward in an undertaking he might not have the courage to face as a 
whole. A rut piled full of loose rocks, down which trickled enough 
water to suggest what the climb might have been on a rainy day, 
carried me into the very sky above and, taking there new foothold, 
scaled doggedly on into the " realms of eternal silence " where even 
birds were no longer heard and sturdy, squat trees, sighing fitfully as if 
struggling for breath, at length gave up in despair and abandoned the 
scene to huge, black rocks protruding from a soil that gave sustenance 
only to the dead-brown ichu-grass of Andean heights. " Hay mucho 
silencio y mucho matador," my host of the night had mumbled lu- 
gubriously, but I was aware only of the music of the wind and the 
joyful realization that the broken mountains had gathered themselves 
together again under my feet and raised me once more to my accus- 
tomed temperate zone. By cold noonday a tumbled, blue world lay 
about and below me, only an insignificant dent in it representing that 
overheated hell locally known as the Province of Jaen. Like life it- 
self, what had seemed at its base a mighty climb proved here at the 
top to have been only an insignificant little knoll down in the valley, 
and only when one had reached the real summit, and could look back 

256 




■9 



is > 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

upon the region as a whole after- all was accomplished, did each little 
struggle and petty suffering assume its correct proportion. 

Another step forward, and before my glad eyes spread one of those 
broad, green interandean valleys, backed by serrated black ranges, 
their brows wrinkled and furrowed with age, the clouds trailing their 
purple shadows across a panorama of little cultivated valleys, into 
which I descended from the unconscionable summit by a natural stair- 
way. The blue-gray peaks turned to lilac in the last rays of the chill 
highland sun, then faded away into the luminous sky of night as the 
mountain cold settled down like an icy poncho, and with dusk I tramped 
through a long adobe street into the central plaza of Cutervo. 

My legs seemed to have pushed me again into the outskirts of 
civilization. Not only did the subprefect drive off of his own initia- 
tive the open-mouthed throng that gathered about his door, rather than 
read my papers aloud to them, but here at last was a Peruvian town 
that actually recognized the existence of strangers with appetites, and 
a large adobe hut publicly admitted itself a fonda. Cutervo was, in 
reality, monotonously like any other town of the Sierra. To one com- 
ing upon it out of the trackless wilderness, however, it seemed at first 
sight a place of mighty importance, and only gradually dwindled to its 
true proportions. Like a man just returned from long months in the 
polar ice, I had an all but irresistible desire to rush in and buy every- 
thing in sight, as I wandered past its long line of open shop-doors. The 
capital of a department recently cut off from the neighboring one of 
Chota, it was the first place in Peru where any appreciable number of 
the inhabitants could unreservedly be called white, and boasted the 
first specimens of beauty among the fair sex. Even the Lima news- 
papers were there, to give me a skeleton sketch of the activities of a 
half- forgotten world. 

There is a reserve of strength in the human body which few suspect 
until they tax it in an emergency ; but it is only after recovery that the 
traveler through the rough places of the earth realizes how weak he 
has gradually become from hardships and lack of real nourishment. 
The envigorating air of the temperate zone and the meat of Cutervo's 
fonda, however, had soon given me new energy, and seemed to have re- 
duced to half the weight of my load. Hope, brutally felled to earth, 
ever crawls dizzily to its feet again. I could no more rid myself of the 
fond dream of some day ceasing to stagger under my own baggage 
than a leper can shake off his affliction. Yet the solemn promise of the 

257 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

ruler of Cutervo to furnish me a carrier resulted only in a lost day, 
and I struck off across the rolling mountains and valleys beyond, con- 
vinced at last, so I fancied, that I should dream no longer. So per- 
sistent had been the promise of foul play on this day's route that, de- 
spite a lifetime of disappointments, I could not but peer hopefully into 
the many splendid lurking-places of the wild, rock-strewn upland I 
followed in utter solitude all the gorgeous day from Cutervo to Chota, 
the next provincial capital. Only once did I catch sight of fellow- 
beings. A group of arrieros with laden asses paused dubiously near 
the top of the range where they caught the first glimpse of me, then 
ventured forward and halted to ask anxiously : 

"Are the robbers not attacking this morning?" 

My answer they greeted with a fervent " Ave Maria Purisima ! " 
and, crossing themselves ostentatiously, that the saints should not by 
any chance overlook their devotion, pushed hurriedly on toward Cu- 
tervo. 

Early in the afternoon I came out on the upper edge of an enor- 
mous, wide-spread valley just across which, in the lap of a rolling 
plain sloping toward me and the hair-like winding river at its bottom, 
lay the end of the day's journey, — Chota; a tiny, dull-red patch in a 
green-brown immensity of sun-flooded world, the two towers of its not 
too conspicuous church pin-pricking the horizon. In the transparent 
air of the highlands it seemed at most a short two hours away. In 
reality I had not in that time picked my stony way to the bottom of 
the rock-scarred valley, and it was long after night had cast its black 
poncho over all the world that I stumbled at last into the elusive town. 

Chota, " 8000 feet, 4000 inhabitants, 3000 doors " — and no windows, 
nearly as cold as Quito, is a provincial capital with well-cobbled streets 
and a broad expanse of plaza, all tilting to the north, by far the largest 
Peruvian city I had yet seen, almost the equal in size of Loja in Ecua- 
dor. The stock of its many little shops comes in by way of Pacasmayo 
and the railroad to Chilete, showing that I was " over the divide " and 
approaching Cajamarca. On August 30, 1882, it was destroyed by 
the Chilians — " los malditos chilenos," as the inhabitants still call them 
— but Andean building material being plentiful, it soon rose from its 
mud ruins. The cura was even then superintending the cholos tramp- 
ing together with their bare feet the clay and chopped ichu-grass that 
was to be a new church. There were numerous fondas, as befitted a 
great capital ; that is, mud dens with a reed shanty in the barnyard be- 
hind serving as kitchen, kept by well-meaning but unprepossessing fe- 

258 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

males who wiped the inside of each plate religiously on their ample 
hips, those same draft-horse hips on which they squatted on the earth 
floor to fill the receptacles similarly placed, while driving off with the 
free hand the curs and guinea-pigs and the chickens perching on the 
edge of the kettles. There were even oil-lamps in a few of the more 
pretentious shops and mansions, though almost all without chimneys, 
not easily imported from the other side of the world by ship and mule- 
back over breakneck trails. Haughty, belligerent roosters stood tied by 
a leg before half the doors in town, so that each street was a long vista 
of pugnacious cocks frequently submitting to the anxious ministrations 
of their proud owners. Even without them I should not have slept 
unbrokenly. Official assistance had gained me lodging on the home- 
made counter of an empty shop hung with cobwebs and perfumed with 
the mustiness of several generations, the door of which, flush with the 
narrow sidewalk, of course, was the only source of air. There, as 
often as a night-hawk passed on his way home from the local " billar," 
he paused to beat me awake with the rapping of his cane and to sing- 
song in that dulcet voice of the Latin-American, mellow with late hours, 
" Your door is open, sefior ; I will close it for you." And if, instead 
of reaching under the counter for my revolver or a convenient adobe 
brick, I did not summon a patient courtesy I do not possess and 
answer, " Mil gracias, sefior ; no, thank you, leave it open, please," and 
then rise and open it again, because he fancied his ears had deceived 
him, I should have lost the rating of " simpatico," and been branded 
a rude and discourteous gringo. 

Bambamarca, an atrociously stony half-day beyond Chota and its 
surrounding bowl, like a mosaic of little farms where female shepherds, 
bare to their weather-browned knees, incessantly turn the white, brown, 
and black fleece of their flocks into yarn on their crude Incaic spindles, 
reported the trail ahead " the worst road in Peru " — which is indeed 
strong language. They were certain, too, that, though I might — with 
the accent on the verb — have arrived from " La Provincia " alive, the 
marauders beyond would see to it that I did not reach Cajamarca in 
that condition. A cold rain fell incessantly from sullen skies during 
a day of unbroken plodding, first up the canon of a small river, 
crossed now and then by thatched bridges, until it dwindled away and 
left me to splash at random over a reeking mountain-top. I had been 
lost for hours, and was dripping water at every pore, when I spied, 
toward what would have been sunset, four little Indian boys huddled 
under the ruin of a hut, and signed to them to give me information. 

. 259 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

Instead, they took to their heels, as if all the evil spirits of the Inca 
religion had suddenly crested the water-soaked range. I set after 
them, but my best pace under my load being barely equal to theirs, 
I drew my revolver and fired twice into the air ; whereupon they halted 
and awaited me in ashen fear. The one I chose as guide led me over 
a rolling paramo deeply gashed by rain-swollen streams, and abandoned 
me within sight of the imposing estate-house of what turned out to be 
the " Hacienda Yanacancha." In the corredor, just out of reach of 
the drenching rain, stood a white man in khaki, monarch of half the 
visible world, and so little like the uncouth illiterate I expected that he 
replied in faultless Castilian to my remark about the absence of roads : 

" Yes, unfortunately South America fell to the Spaniards, whereas 
it should have been settled by Anglo-Saxons." 

Here, for the first time in Peru, was an hacendado who had trained 
his dogs and servants to some understanding of their respective spheres, 
and had even given the latter an inkling of that thin, gray line between 
cleanliness and its opposite. A trivial incident will demonstrate to 
what lowly point of view my recent experiences had brought me. 
When my host showed me into a large guest-room, I caught sight, in 
the semi-obscurity, of a reed mat on the floor, and through me flashed 
a thrill of joy that I should have this to sleep on, instead of the cold, 
dank tiles. Whereas, on closer view this proved to be the foot-mat be- 
fore a huge colonial bedstead, regally furnished with soft mattresses 
and spotless woolen blankets. My host even apologized for the ab- 
sence of sheets. As if I should have recognized that forgotten flora, 
even in its native habitat ! Yet my misgivings of playing the role of 
Hugo's maltreated hero materialized. Whether it was due to the 
fever within me struggling for existence, or to the all-too-sudden re- 
turn to luxury, I tossed sleeplessly well into the night, and it was 
rolled up on the mat on the tile floor that the cold, steel-gray dawn 
creeping in at the wooden-barred windows found me. 

The " road " across soggy highland meadows and past those fan- 
tastic heaped-up peaks and splintered ranges of black rocks that give 
the " Hacienda Yanacancha " (" Black Rocks ") its name, was largely 
imaginary. At first, within sprinting distance of the house, were a 
few inhabited haycocks of shepherds, like Esquimaux dwellings of 
weather-blackened pajonal in place of snow and ice, with a hole to 
crawl in at on all fours. Then the visible world, straining ever higher, 
spread out into a rolling mountain-top, a totally uninhabited region 
where was heard only the mournful sighing of the wind across a bound- 

260 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

less, rolling, yellow-brown sea of the dreary bunch-grass of the upper 
Andes. Across it the often invisible way undulated with such regu- 
larity that I was continually descending into or climbing out of hollows 
trodden to a mud pudding about the cold streams that wandered 
down from the scarcely more lofty heights. There were myriad hid- 
ing-places behind the jagged gray rocks piled erratically along the way, 
from which evil-doers might have picked me off. So notorious is this 
region for its mishaps to travelers that natives rarely cross it except 
in large groups. But the wholesome respect in which a " gringo," 
especially one who carries a shooting-iron prominently displayed, is 
held is the best protection in Latin-America, far more so than an 
escort of native soldiers, the presence of which is apt to imply to the 
lurking bandit an admission of inability to depend on one's gringo self, 
even if the soldiers do not prove confederates of the outlaws or run 
away at sight of them. 

On and ever on the cold, desolate, inhospitable despoblado rose and 
fell in broad swells or billows, the barren, yellow, uninhabited world 
sighing mournfully to itself. This long day is obligatory on all who 
come to Cajamarca from the north, for there is no halting-place in all 
the expanse of puna south of Yanacancha. I should have covered the 
thirty-five miles before the day was done, had not a long dormant or 
newly acquired fever suddenly broken out in mid-afternoon. Every 
setting of one leg before the other was as great an effort as jumping 
over a ferry-boat, yet I must prod myself pitilessly on, for to be over- 
taken by night on this inhospitable, wind-swept puna would have been 
worse than fever. With infinite struggle I came at last to where 
this broadest of paramos began to fall away toward the north; then 
the slope contracted to a gully that gathered together the score or 
more of separate but not distinct paths that make up the " highway " 
across the lofty plain, and brought me before sunset to the first of a 
scattered cluster of stone and mud kennels. A leather-faced old In- 
dian, speaking the first Quichua I had heard since Cuenca, gave me a 
handful of ichu-grass to sit on outside the smaller of his two huts, 
and left me to the company of his prowling yellow curs. Night had 
fallen completely before a woman brought me a gourd of boiling 
potato mush, but at length the chary old Indian, overcoming his racial 
indifference and distrust, opened the door of the hut against which I 
lay and let me into a sort of Incaic warehouse. In it were heaps of 
the huge balls of yarn spun by the Indian women on their prehistoric 
spindles, a supply of paramo grass I might spread on the earth floor, 

261 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

and several large bolts of homespun cloth of coarse texture and cruder 
colors with which I might feather my arctic nest, once it was late 
enough to hope the owner would not catch me at it. 

In the adjoining family hut a baby had been crying incessantly for 
an hour or more. The afterchill of the fever was settling upon me 
when a young Indian entered, bearing the infant, and a handful of 
twisted grass as torch. Without preliminary he requested me, if I un- 
derstood his language, to spit in the child's face. 

" I don't get you," I replied, in my most colloquial if imperfect 
Quichua. 

" Do me the favor to spit in its face," he repeated, and by way of 
illustration spat swiftly and lightly, with the point of his tongue be- 
tween his lips, a fine spray in the face of the squalling infant. 

" But why not do it yourself? " I protested. 

" Manam, viracocha ; it must be some one the guaguita does not 
know." 

When it had become evident that there was no other way of being 
left in peace, I rose and sprayed the infant. To my astonishment it 
ceased its wailing instantly, stared wide-eyed into my face until the 
father turned away, and was not again heard during the night. Floor- 
walking benedicts may adopt this bit of domestic science from the 
ancient civilization of the Incas free of charge. 

There were but nine miles left to do in the morning, but the mere 
numeral gives little hint of the real task. Both road and bridges con- 
tinued strikingly conspicuous by their absence ; for hours the atrocious 
trail zigzagged unevenly, at times almost perpendicularly down what 
was left of the mountainside. Then it forded waist-deep the Caja- 
marca river, and joining a Sunday-morning procession of market- 
bound Indians with a clashing of colors almost equal to those of Quito, 
picked its way around stony foothills along a slowly widening valley 
gradually checkered with the varying greens of cultivation. The cool 
summer air and a more passable road drew me ever more swiftly on ; 
the sound of church-bells, musically distant, floating northward on the 
breeze, located vaguely somewhere among the eucalyptus trees ahead 
the end of the third stage of my Andean journey. Huts turned to 
houses, thicker and thicker along the way, until they grew together into 
two unbroken rows. The air grew heavy with the scent of the " Aus- 
tralian gum " ; I passed under an aged, whitewashed arch straddling 
the street, and on April 27, at the hour of the return from mass, found 
myself creaking along the canted, flagstone sidewalks of famous old 

262 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

Cajamarca, the first real city, even in the South- American sense, I 
had come upon in Peru. Armed and bedraggled, with an alforja hang- 
ing heavy over one shoulder, I presented no conventional sight. Yet 
the cajamarquinos gave me comparatively slight attention. No doubt 
they were accustomed to such apparitions; Pizarro and his fellow- 
roughnecks could have been little less wayworn and weather-bleached 
when they rode in upon Cajamarca over these same hills. Accord- 
ing to careful calculation I had walked 1773 miles from Bogota, 929 
from Quito. Of the 79 days from the Ecuadorian capital I had spent 
thirty in the towns and hamlets along the way, and the remainder in 
whole or part on the road. 

As far back as Ayavaca I had begun to hear praises of the " mag- 
nificent hotels " of Cajamarca. The disappointment was propor- 
tionately bitter. The " Hotel Internacional " was a defunct lodging- 
house, the " Hotel Amazonas," further on, merely a row of rooms 
opening on the second-story balcony. They were tolerable rooms, 
with flagstone floors and wooden bed-springs, and had the extraordi- 
nary advantage of being in the second story, out of reach of staring 
passersby ; but they were furnished only with the bare necessities and 
were covered everywhere with a half-inch, more or less, of dust. 
This was hardly to be wondered at. Pizarro and his band of tramps 
must have raised a deuce of a dust when they perpetrated the Conquest 
of Peru and took Atahuallpa into their tender keeping in the great 
plaza a short block away, on that Saturday evening, 381 years before. 
Strangest of all, the hotel rates were posted in plain sight, where even 
foreigners might see; forty cents a night, or thirty if the room was 
occupied a month or more. Evidently another fussy gringo had been 
here before me, for the printed rules contained the following by- 
law: 

" The senor passenger who shall desire to use two mattresses on the 
same bed will subject himself to the payment of ten cents above the or- 
dinary pension." 

The original motive could not have been Hays; for the notice was 
yellow with time, and the manager-chambermaid, though he gave me 
many details of the doings of my erstwhile companion as he grad- 
ually got my indispensable requirements together, with great care not 
to remove the historic dust anywhere, did not mention any such gringo 
idiosyncrasy. Every non-resident of Cajamarca, be he a tawny, soil- 
incrusted Indian from up in the hills, or the representative of some am- 
bitious European house, eats in one of two Chinese fondas, or take- 

263 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

your-chances restaurants, not far off the main plaza. The transient 
enters a Celestial general-store, passes through it and a dingy room, 
crowded with tables about which barefoot Indians, male and female, 
their aged felt hats on their heads, are helping themselves with spoons 
or fingers, and through another doorless door into a smaller chamber 
with a single long table covered by an oilcloth of long and troubled 
history, where he is sure to find a place because of the requirement of 
shoes. During the process he will pass close by the open kitchen with 
its iron cooking-range — the first I had seen in South America — 
manipulated by a grizzled old Chinaman. The service is a la carte and, 
but for the shoes and oilcloth, identical in both dining-rooms. Here 
one will find a greasy strip of paper with a printed menu, easily com- 
prehensible to anyone with a Spanish and Quichua dictionary, a treatise 
on Peruvian coast slang, and some smacking of Chinese in Spanish mis- 
spelling; or which, in the very likely event of the client being unable to 
read, the barefoot waiter will recite in Shakesperean cadence and 
breathless continuity. Indeed, but for the language, one might fancy 
oneself back on the lower Bowery as the waiter bawls to the kitchen : 

" Un churrasco ! " 

" Un biste f ogoso ! " 

" Hasta cuando esos choclos ? " 

The high cost of living, like the railroad decreed by congress in 
1864, had not yet climbed over the range into Cajamarca. The dishes 
are 23^ or five cents each. There are, to be sure, a few ten-cent ones, 
but these are what terrapin would be with us, and their consumption is 
not encouraged, being above the tone of Cajamarca. The first price 
covers a dozen delicacies, such as " patitas con arroz — pigs' f eetlets 
with rice," fried brains, liver, or chupe, the Irish-stew of the Andes. 
At five cents the epicure to whom money is no object may have a 
breaded " biste " with onions, rice, and potatoes, a " baefs teak pai," 
" rosbif de cordero — roast beef of mutton — " " a beefsteak of pork," 
and a score of even more endurable concoctions. Chocolate, which is 
native to the region and excellently made, is 2]/ 2 cents ; a cup of coffee, 
which no one in Cajamarca knows how to make, costs twice that. 
Eggs " in any style " are two cents each, and a loaf of bread, of the 
size of a biscuit, one cent — for in Cajamarca the traveler first finds 
the huge copper one-cent and half-cent pieces. The greatest gourmand 
sailing the high seas could not spend more than fifteen, or possibly 
twenty cents, for a dinner in Cajamarca — and a "tip" is unknown. 

I had been duly warned that the table-manners would be on a par 

264 




The only wheeled vehicle I saw in Peru during my first three months in that country 




One of the many unfinished churches of Cajamarca 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

with those of Colombia and Ecuador. Before I left Quito, Hays had 
written, " In Peru soup is eaten with brilliancy, the high notes being 
sustained with great verve." The same table utensils reached both 
the shod minority and the Indians under their hats ; the table de luxe 
was supplied, after that democratic South American manner, with one 
drinking-glass, the only washing of which was what it inadvertently 
received during its varied service. 

Cajamarca, as everyone whose historical education was not crimi- 
nally neglected knows, was not founded; it was found; and like any- 
thing else picked up by the Spaniards of those days, was never re- 
turned. It lay already — but unprepared — spread out in the extreme 
northwest corner of its long, fertile valley when Pizarro and his merry 
men came riding down upon it across the same broad paramo, and 
they caught much the same view of it as I, though in those days it was 
not half-hidden by the adorning eucalyptus trees of to-day, nor dis- 
tantly musical with church-bells. The famous town, now capital of 
a department, which is to Peru what a state is with us, is more or 
less oval in shape, some ten by twenty blocks at its widest and longest, 
not counting the huts that straggle out at both ends along its principal 
" highway " and dot the outskirts and the widening plain. It is seven 
degrees below the equator and somewhat warmer than Quito. It 
stands 2814 meters above the sea, with some half-dozen inhabitants 
for every meter. In all but its history it is tiresomely like any other 
city of the Andes. The streets, monotonously right-angled, are rudely 
cobbled, with open sewers down the center, the sidewalks narrow, 
smooth-worn flagstones on which he who would walk must jostle 
Indians, donkeys, and stagnant groups of less useful residents. The 
adobe houses, often two-story and always toeing the street-line, are 
red-tile roofed and anciently whitewashed. Dingy little shops of odds 
and ends below, the flower-decked patios of even the best-provided 
families are surrounded on the ground floor by the dens of servants 
and the ragged and more numerous population, as in Quito. It was 
the first place in Peru where I had seen window-glass. By night its 
streets are " lighted " with faroles, miniature kerosene lamps inside 
square, glass-sided lanterns that are given to succumbing to the first 
strong puff of breeze, even if those whose duty it is to light them do 
not have more pressing engagements. The central plaza is enormous, 
square in form, but coinciding more or less with the triangular one in 
which Pizarro and the Inca collided on that dusty Saturday evening 
of an earlier century. Flower-plots, tended with less monotonous 

265 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

formality than those of Quito, bloom chiefly with geraniums, and 
among them the historically informed inhabitants point out the stone 
on which Atahuallpa succumbed to the garrote amid the heaven- 
opening ministrations of good old Father Greenvale. As in Quito, 
there remain almost no monuments of pre-Conquest days, for the 
Incas seem to have built here chiefly of adobe. The most intelligent 
of Cajamarca's monks doubted whether there was even a Temple of 
the Sun or a House of the Virgins to transform into monastery or 
convent. Not far oft" the main plaza, however, set cornerwise in the 
center of a modern block, is the room that was to be filled with gold 
for Atahuallpa's ransom, said to be of massive dressed stone, like the 
palaces of Cuzco. Stevenson, who was in Cajamarca just a hundred 
years before me, found still visible around the wall the mark that was 
to measure the height of the treasure, and the room, the residence of a 
cacique. To-day it is an orphanage, where a German nun was teach- 
ing a score of female " orphans " to earn a livelihood on American 
sewing-machines, and the treasure-mark, as well as all evidence of 
stone structure, had been whitewashed out of existence, as something 
of " los Gentiles " not worth preserving. 

The unique characteristic of Cajamarca, and almost her only stone 
buildings, are her half-dozen splendid old churches, soft-browned by 
time as those of Salamanca, and having the appearance of being half- 
ruined by earthquakes. The natives asserted, however, that they were 
left incomplete because in colonial days every finished building must 
pay tribute to the King of Spain. Whatever the cause, their condition 
gives an unusual architectural effect that could not have been equalled 
by any design of man, and all who find pleasure in the " picturesque " 
must hope that Cajamarca will never grow wealthy enough to finish 
them — a misfortune that is not imminent. The Chilians came in 
August, 1882, and, taking a note from Pizarro's note-book — or, more 
exactly, from that of his secretary, since the swine-herder of Estre- 
madura was not fitted to keep his own — stole all the gold and jewels 
of the churches, even the laboratory equipment of the schools, and 
anything else that chanced to be lying around; though they found no 
one worth holding for ransom. One of the principal churches bears 
an inscription, now all but effaced by the ubiquitous whitewash, an- 
nouncing that " This santa eglesia was erected at the cost of one million 
pesos and fifteen centavos," the extra seven cents being the cost of bell- 
ropes. In the great monastery of San Francisco, facing the main 
plaza, some forty amiable but ignorant friars loll through life, chiefly 

266 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

in the breezy " retiring kiosk," carpeted, like that of Quito, with burnt 
matches and cigarette butts. They knew nothing of the tomb of 
Atahuallpa, but the Spanish organist, who looked like a ninth-inning 
baseball " fan " on a hot day, led me to the church and played in my 
honor on " the largest and best pipe-organ in Peru " not only our 
national air, but several Spanish fandangos and a recent Broadway 
favorite that is seldom admitted to ecclesiastical circles. 

The Indians and gente del pueblo of Cajamarca have nearly as much 
color of dress as those of Quito, and are even more ragged and ab- 
jectly poverty-ridden. Filthy, maimed beggars adorn the fagades of 
churches, and the aboriginals speak a mushy, mouthful, dialect of 
Quichua, though all know Spanish. None of the Chinese residents 
have families ; yet every now and then one passes a child with quaintly 
shaped eyes that testify to the engratiating manners of the Celestials. 
The " upper " classes struggle to keep the theoretically white collars 
and the dandified shoes that mark their caste, and dawdle through life 
as shopkeepers, lawyers without clients, doctors whose degrees fur- 
nish them little but the title, or at any makeshift occupation that will 
spare them from soiling their tapering fingers with vulgar labor. 
Opportunity is a rare visitor, yet in a century, perhaps, there has not 
been born in Cajamarca a boy with the initiative and energy to tramp 
three days over the western range and stow away for somewhere that 
he could make a man of himself. As to personal habits: a drug 
clerk graduated in Lima pours out of their bottles the pills he recom- 
mends, and plays them idly back and forth from one unwashed hand 
to the other before returning them to the shelf. Yet it was a relief 
to loll away several days in civilization, even Peruvianly speaking. If 
the passing stranger was not entirely free from the open mouth and 
vacant eye, he could pass a corner group without all falling silent and 
craning their necks after him, and might even sit down at the fonda 
table without all interrupting their noisy eating to mumble over their 
mouthful, " Where do you come from and where are you going ? " 
But even a Peruvian department capital has not yet reached that stage 
which makes photography easy, or the coarsest sarcasm effective. As 
often as I opened my kodak, some " educated " member of society was 
sure to crowd close to me, keeping persistently in front of the lens ; 
and when I had at length manoeuvered and tricked him out of the view, 
more or less, I was seeking, he was certain to bleat with his blandest 
smile, " Sacando una plancha, no, sefior ? " If I made answer, " No, 
my esteemed friend of ancient and noble blood, I am building an aero- 

267 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

plane on sleigh-runners to cross the icy stretches of the Amazon," the 
half-baked son of the wilderness might reflect solemnly a moment or 
two before making some such inane reply as, " Yes, it is a long way to 
the Amazon." Almost at the hour of my arrival an enamored youth 
of Cajamarca committed suicide, leaving a letter in which he declared 
life was a farce. Had he been with me through the Province of Jaen, 
he would have found it more nearly a melodrama. Only those who 
have endured the hardships of a long trail can know the compensating 
pleasure of a return to even comparative comfort, like the burgeoning 
of spring after a hard winter. But, after all, the joys of the trail in 
the Andes are chiefly those of anticipation, and the sense of accomplish- 
ment, of exclusiveness in tramping where few men have tramped be- 
fore. For there can be slight pleasure of intercourse in towns where 
the youths of the " best families " follow the foreigner with cries of 
" Goot neeght. Awe right," broken by snickers of silly laughter ; and 
where dreams of long hours in something resembling a bed are rudely 
dispelled by the din of church-bells, the whistles of lonesome policemen, 
and all the thousand and one noises with which the Latin-American can 
make life hideous. In the matter of libraries and book-shops Peru 
is even less advanced than the countries to the north. There was, to 
be sure, a department library in Cajamarca, but " for the present " it 
was closed. In despair I canvassed the town for a book. A clerk 
whom I asked why no printed matter was to be had, replied : 

" No hay aficionados a la lectura en estas partes, senor." 

" Amateurs of reading," indeed ! As one might say, aficionados of 
billiards, " fans " of cock-fighting ; merely an amusing game to pass 
the time. 

" But what on earth do people do with their minds ? " I gasped. 

" They go to church, senor," replied the clerk. 

But the best of Cajamarca is her wonderful green and checkered 
valley, as seen from the rocky hillock ten minutes above the main plaza, 
now serving as a quarry of soft, whitish stone, but on which, if any- 
where, must have been the fortress historians tell us overlooked the 
Inca city. There is, indeed, to-day the remnants of a cobble-stone and 
adobe building on the summit, and cajamarquinos who climb there to 
enjoy the widespread view asserted that Atahuallpa used to watch 
from this height the rising and setting of the sun. Prescott might 
almost have sat on the rocky hillock in person when he wrote : 

" The valley of Cajamarca, enamelled with all the beauties of cultiva- 
tion, lay unrolled like a rich and variegated carpet of verdure, in strong 

268 



APPROACHING INCA LAND 

contrast with the dark forms of the Andes that rose up everywhere 
about it. The vale is of oval shape, extending about five leagues 
in length by three in breadth, and was inhabited by a superior popula- 
tion to any the Spaniards had yet seen; with ten thousand houses of 
clay hardened in the sun and some ambitious dwellings of hewn stone." 
The valley, stretching away south-southeast, is not so extensive as 
the reading of Prescott leads the imagination to picture. Except in 
one place, where it spreads out like the arms of a cross, it is surely not 
more than a league in width. But the suave spring view across it, 
green with the deep green of the cactus, and clumped now by the Aus- 
tralian eucalyptus in contrast to the treeless days of the Incas, is in 
certain moods and aspects the most beautiful of the Andes, though 
lacking the surrounding snowclads that add so much to the vale of 
Quito. Here I came often to sit above the murmur of the town, until 
the God of the Incas, after his daily journey around the earth to see 
that all was well, sank behind the broad paramo of Yanacancha, blot- 
ting out the valley stretching away to the southward where the trail 
following the old Inca highway down the backbone of the continent, 
was already beckoning me on. 



269 



CHAPTER XI 

DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

TRAMPING down the Andes is like walking on the ridge of a 
steep roof; there is a constant tendency to slip off on one 
side or the other and slide down to the Pacific or the Amazon. 
The Latin-American is only too prone to follow the line of least re- 
sistance, and that line is not along the crest of the Andes where the 
more manly Incas traveled. The villager obliged to journey to an- 
other town of the Sierra a hundred miles north or south will ride mule- 
back something more than that to the nearest port, take ship to an- 
other harbor, and ride another hundred miles up into the interior to 
his destination. Hence the excellent highway that might have been 
built down all the backbone of the continent, or at least the Inca one 
that might have been kept up, does not exist. Each community is con- 
fined to its own valley and cut off from the rest by almost untrodden 
mountain ranges, or by trackless bare ridges where only sheep and their 
hardy shepherds can live. Under the beneficent rule of the Incas 
means of intercommunication were infinitely better than to-day; then, 
roads and bridges were kept in constant repair, and in all exposed 
parts, at intervals along the cold punas and among the mountain 
gorges, were government tambos with shelter and food for both man 
and llamas. 

To journey from Cajamarca to Lima would have been easy; I had 
only to hire a mule to Pacasmayo and catch a passing steamer. But 
to reach there by the route I had proposed to myself was another mat- 
ter. Even Raimondi's famous map of Peru, in 25 folios, over which I 
spent a morning in the prefect's parlor, offered scanty information, a 
few faint lines representing trails leading almost anywhere except 
where I would go. The only route at all suited to my purpose seemed 
to be one through Huamachuco and Huraraz, and along the valley of 
the Santa river. Near the source of this it looked as if I must turn 
back almost due north and climb over the uninhabited, snowclad Cor- 
dillera Central, whence it might be possible to reach Cerro de Pasco. 
Local information was not even equal to the assertion of Prescott — 

270 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

who had never been nearer South America than the southern coast of 
Massachusetts — that " the messengers of Pizarro from Caxamalca to 
Cuzco followed the elevated regions of the Cordillera through many 
populous towns, of which the chief were Guamachuco, Guanuco, and 
Xauxa." At best I had to leave the scene of Atahuallpa's undoing 
with little knowledge of where I was going, except southward. 

Certain preparations were essential before I plunged again into the 
all but unknown. The trip from Loja — the longest sustained hard- 
ship I had ever undergone — had left me a sadly depleted ward- 
robe. Especially were my walking-boots in the last stages. The shops 
of Cajamarca had no heavy ones among their stock, but I had hoped, 
with the assistance of the prefect, to buy a pair of the shoes manufac- 
tured for the use of the garrison-police. The department chief, how- 
ever, put off wiring the president, or laying the matter before congress, 
until it was too late. A friendly shoemaker advised me to apply pri- 
vately to a soldier or policeman. 

" But they have only one pair each," I protested. 

" True," replied the zapatero, " pero se roban entre ellos — they 
steal from each other." 

This hint also had been too long delayed, and I was forced to trust 
to native patching to carry me over the indefinite region to the next 
source of supply. As to socks, I had found that the best for tramp- 
ing the Andes were none at all; that is, a better substitute were the 
" f usslappen " of the German soldier, — a square of cotton flannel on 
which to set the foot diagonally, fold over the three corners, and thrust 
it into the boot. The small silver pieces that came to me each time I 
threw down a sovereign on the Chinaman's counter, I had laid away 
for the road ahead, spending the heavy coppers and the cartwheel 
soles. This petty point is extremely important in the Andes, for even 
the man able and willing to toss out gold for every banana he buys 
often finds villages of the Sierra where the yellow metal will not be 
accepted ; and those who might otherwise be willing to change a large 
coin are frequently afraid to show that they have so much money on 
hand. The rucksack style of carrying had proved burdensome. For 
the load that remained I made a leather harness, not unlike suspenders, 
with half my possessions balanced against the rest. Then, having 
squandered 21 cents in the greatest banquet known to the Chinaman's 
back room, I climbed the fortress hill to watch for the last time the 
interwoven colors of the setting sun across the rich vale of Cajamarca. 

It was the seventh of May when I struck southward again* along 

271 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the valley floor. A wide highway sidestepped out of the city; but 
barely had the scent of this been left behind than a shallow river took 
possession of the entire width of the road. There is a sort of law- 
lessness both of man and nature in the Andes, and many is the 
hacendado who thus calmly makes use of the public highway as his 
irrigation ditch. When Hernando de Soto was sent with fifteen horse 
to visit the Inca at his baths a few miles south of the city, " they fol- 
lowed a fine causeway across the plain and came to a small stream with 
a bridge, but, distrusting its strength, dashed through the water." An 
hour from town I, too, was dashing through the water, boots in hand, 
not because I distrusted the bridge, but because there was not the ves- 
tige of a bridge left to distrust. 

Beyond the stream were the famous " Bafios del Inca," now owned 
by the city of Cajamarca. In the barnyard of a stone and adobe 
hacienda a chola woman sent an Indian boy to open for me an ad- 
joining baked-mud room, in the floor of which was a rough-stone swim- 
ming-pool nearly ten feet square. Into this steaming sulphurous water 
was pouring. But as a group of Indians were washing themselves and 
their rags in the source of supply outside, I was forced to relinquish 
the rare pleasure of a hot bath, even in so famous a setting. His- 
torians report the existence of an ancient stone bathtub that was used 
by the Incas, but the woman was certain there had been none in the 
vicinity during her career as caretaker. 

The road she pointed out emerged from the back gate of the ha- 
cienda and mounted the steaming brook. Higher up, where I thrust 
a hand in it, the water was just hot enough to be bearable. The valley 
of Cajamarca, stretching far southward, had promised level going for 
a day or two. But though there was plenty of space for it on the valley 
floor, the camino real, true to its Andean environment, preferred to 
clamber up and down over stony, barren, broken ridges. Before noon 
it had raised me to a paramo where several cold, blue lakes swarmed 
with wild ducks that were not even gun-shy. An Indian I fell in with 
said they were never hunted, " because when they fall there is no way 
to enter the water and get them." Evidently, like his forebears of 
centuries ago, he had never heard of a strange invention called a boat. 

Two days of stony going, now between hedges of ripe tunas, now 
over high ridges, gashed and tumbled, by a trail thirsty despite the 
frequent fording of luke-warm streams gray with decomposed rock, 
brought me to San Marcos in a tropical and fruitful valley withered by 
a long drought. On the fagade of the little drygoods shop and gov- 

272 




One of the few remaining simpichacas, or suspension bridges, of the Andes. In Inca days 

they abounded, often sagging from one mountain-top to another over appalling gorges. 

To-day steel cables take the place of the woven willow withes of pre- Colombian 

times, but the flooring is often missing and the swinging contraptions 

uninviting to man or beast 




A typical shop of the Andes. On the right, eggs and chancaca, the brown blocks of crude 

sugar wrapped in banana-leaves; in the doorway, pancake-shaped corn biscuits; 

on the left, oranges, green in color though ripe, and the wheat-bread 

only too seldom to be had even in this form 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

ernment salt-store of the absent gobernador hung a huge sign be- 
ginning " socorro peones," implying that the owner was also a 
" hooker " of workmen for a German-owned sugar estate down on the 
coast. When I presented my order from the prefect of the depart- 
ment, the wife of San Marcos' chief " authority " ordered her cholas 
to prepare me dinner at once. 

" I did not come to the gobernador that he should personally fur- 
nish me accommodations," I protested. " I only want him to use his 
authority with those who make a business of lodging strangers." 

" There is no such place in San Marcos," replied the woman, lock- 
ing up shop and leading me into her parlor, musty with disuse, " but 
all travelers are welcome here." 

Behind the divan to which she motioned me stood a life-size figure 
of the Virgin, flanked by another of Saint Somebody. In honor of 
the arrival of a stranger, perhaps, the matron soon reappeared with 
several serving-women and, stripping the " Madre de Dios" to her 
bamboo-structured nudity, reattired her in four gowns, each of which 
was far more costly than those worn by any of the living beings pres- 
ent. Then she set a newly polished crown on the head of the image 
and, falling on her knees before it, began to rock back and forth im- 
ploring her intercession in a monotonous singsong. With dusk ap- 
peared the gobernador, accompanied by two traveling salesmen, and 
having ordered the three mules picketed, he spent a long evening bewail- 
ing with them the rising cost of commodities " of first necessity, even 
our very aguardiente and pisco, senores." In the act of looking over 
my papers, his eye was caught by a typewritten document in English. 

" Ah, los yanquis ! " he cried. " They are so up-to-date they even 
avoid the labor of writing by having their letters printed. But how 
can they afford it ? " 

" Una maquina para escribir," I explained. 

" A writing-machine ! " he gasped. " Is there such a thing ? I 
must have one at once, for I never can spell things right." 

The village church having lost its roof, most of the old women in 
town gathered with my hostess in the adjoining parlor and droned for 
hours before her bamboo saints. For a long time the gobernador 
gave no heed to the uproar, though it forced him to raise his voice 
almost to a shout. Then suddenly he broke off an enumeration of 
prices with an angry: 

" Hagame el favor!" (In the Andes the expression corresponds 
closely to our colloquial "What do you know about that?") " Por 

273 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

Dios, those beatas would pray a man insane ! " and dashing into the 
parlor, he broke up the meeting forthwith, and sent the manto-wrapped 
women scurrying out through the zaguan like startled crows. 

For all her religious duties my hostess found time to set down in 
my note-book the recipe of the most potent beverage that has come 
down from the Inca civilization, — the chicha de jora, at the making 
of which that served with the evening meal proved her an adept. In 
a laborious school-girl hand, and with a wealth of misspelling that 
suggested that she, too, could have used a " writing-machine " to ad- 
vantage, she wrote : 

" Take ripe, shelled corn, cover with water and leave a week or 
more until the kernels have sprouted. Dry in the sun two or three 
days. Crush to a mass, boil, and place, when cold, in jars three- 
fourths full, adding sugar sufficient to cause fermentation." 

Despite her piety and attitude of Moorish seclusion, she entered into 
the conversation with a frankness peculiar to the Latin race. Not the 
least startling of her na'ive questions was: 

" How many children have you ? " 

" I am not married," I answered. 

" Of course you are not married," she replied, " being a traveler all 
over Peru and the outside world, but have you really no children 
at all?" 

At daybreak the gobernador sent a boy and a horse to set me across 
— and all but spill me into — a rock-strewn river below the town, 
" because it is very dangerous to wet the feet in the morning." 
Ichocan, two leagues beyond San Marcos, sits high and cold on an 
eminence. Behind it the trail sloped languidly upward, then pitched 
headlong down through a stony, desert-dry wilderness, inhabited only 
by cactus and wild asses, to the Condebamba river, its lower valley 
of densest-green a relieving contrast to the dreary, arid mountain 
flanks. Across the roaring gorge a bridge of steel cables, supported 
by railway rails, has taken the place of the chaca of woven willow 
wjthes of Inca days. But it still looked frail and aerial enough, sway- 
ing high above the racing stream that would quickly have swept a 
stumbling traveler through rock-walled hills to the Marafion and the 
Amazon, and the few arrieros who follow this route have no easy task 
in driving their donkeys across it. 

A pole-and-mud hut on the dreary slope of the further bank housed 
the guardian of the bridge, a fever-laden skeleton who was barely 
able to crawl after an unbroken year of pahidismo, the intermittent 

274 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

fever of the Andes that lurks in all such sunken valleys as that of 
the Condebamba. I might better have spent the night on the hillside 
beyond, than to have tossed it through on the hut floor, swarming with 
some species of shark- jawed insect. Luckily I was not offered the 
first bowl of chicha before I found the guardian's female companion 
concocting the family supply, for her method was little less disillusion- 
ing than that of the yuca-chewing Jivaros Indians. When it had been 
boiled in a huge kettle that spent its days of disuse as a nesting-place 
for the family curs, the liquid was poured off into a long, shallow tub, 
like a small dug-out canoe, the same one that would serve another 
purpose on wash-day. Squatted on the ground beside it, the woman 
was stirring it slowly with a stick she had caught up at random. Bit 
by bit two gaunt and mangy curs slunk nearer, until their noses all but 
touched the steaming liquid, whereupon the woman left off her stir- 
ring long enough to rap them over the head with the ladle. The 
dogs retreated a yard or two with cowardly yelps, only to repeat the 
advance over and over again. The chola's vigilance, it turned out, 
was not due to any unwonted sense of cleanliness ; she was merely bent 
on saving the animals from burning themselves. As soon as she 
judged the liquid cool enough, she gave a sign, and the curs fell upon 
the tub and greedily lapped up the scum. Thus saved the labor of 
skimming it, the female crawled to her feet and set the stuff away in 
earthen jars to ferment. 

One barren, stony ridge after another in pitiless succession carried 
me much higher before the following noonday. My course now lay 
well east of south, for I had caught the swing of the west coast of 
South America. One last mighty surge and the world fell away be- 
fore me, disclosing almost within shouting distance the provincial capi- 
tal of Cajabamba. But it is a good rule in the Andes never to sit down 
in the plaza until you reach the town. Between me and the day's goal 
lay hidden one of those mighty holes in the earth that mean the un- 
doing and repetition of all the toil that has gone before. The shadows 
were beginning to climb the eastern wall of Cajabamba's valley before 
I reached the century-polished cobbles of the street that had swallowed 
up the converging trails. 

The plump young subprefect, who was awaiting me in state upon my 
return from the Chinese f onda to which a soldier had piloted me, would 
have been rosy-cheeked had not some careless ancestor faintly clouded 
his family tree and given a quaint kink to his hair. He returned my 
papers with a regal bow and bade me make my home in his office as 

275 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

long as I chose to honor Cajabamba with my presence. The "bed" 
was a blanket on the yielding, earth-covered floor ; but I had twenty sol- 
diers at my beck and call, and what mattered it if, each time I would 
make my toilet, I must go to jail? Luckily the rust-hinged doors and 
chain-weighted gates creaked with as pompous humility and dignified 
alacrity for my exit as to admit me, though there were those within 
who had not passed them in twenty years. 

By the time I was city-dressed, the subprefect, pomaded and be- 
frocked within an inch of his life, fluttered into my boudoir to ask, 
in breathless oratorical periods, if, inasmuch as he had just been 
married last week, or during the night, and mother down on the coast 
was dying to know what the new acquisition looked like and there 
were no photographers in Cajabamba and it was a pity Peru was so 
backward, would I not have the fineza to take fifteen or twenty pic- 
tures of him and his novia and deliver a few dozen finished and 
mounted prints for him and her and their relatives and friends and 
compadres and associates within an hour or two ? As the carelessness 
of my American agent had left me almost filmless, this was neither 
the first nor the last time I was put to the unpleasant necessity of 
" faking " a picture. To have refused his request, even with humble 
apologies and laborious explanations, would have been to win the ill- 
will of Cajabamba's ruler and all his dependents, had it not resulted in 
the trumping up of some transparent excuse to turn me out and refuse 
me official assistance in finding other lodgings. A photographer speak- 
ing some Spanish could pick up much silver down the crest of the 
Andes ; it would have been a kindness if he had made the trip a few 
days ahead of me. To be sure, these official requests were always use- 
ful, in a way. While the powdered and perfumed " authorities " were 
puffing themselves up to the requisite pomposity, the town was sure to 
gather alongside, and as neither the fancied nor the real subjects were 
well enough versed in mechanics to know whether a kodak operates 
endwise or sidewise, I caught many a nonchalant pose of some really 
worthwhile bystander that I might have begged for in vain. On this 
occasion the novia, having spent a few hours in completely disguising 
herself, as women will under the circumstances the world over, ap- 
peared at last, deathly pale with rice powder, and the pair assumed 
a score of fetching poses under my direction. True, it was dark by 
that time. But the subprefect saw no reason why a photograph should 
not be taken by the light of three sputtering candles. He preferred it, 

276 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

indeed, to embracing his newly-won treasure in the public glare of day. 
But the night had grown aged before he feigned to understand the 
impossibility of immediate delivery, and he accepted only sulkily my 
promise to send the finished portraits back from the next city, " if 
they turned out well." 

During my morning stroll about town I was accosted in English from 
the zaguan of a building of delapidated adobe splendor. So often had 
I heard a laborious " Goot mawnin, seer, how do yo do ? " from some 
silly youth whose knowledge of foreign tongues began and ended with 
that phrase, that I nodded and passed on. I have too much affection 
for my mother tongue to hear it gratuitously maltreated ; moreover, it 
had lain so long idle that to speak it had come to seem an affectation. 

This time, however, the speaker continued with faultless fluency: 

" I hear you are an American." 

" Just so." 

" I am Carlos Traverso, at your service ; graduate of an American 
university." 

"Which one?" 

" Michigan." 

" Indeed ! So am I." 

" Valgame Dios ! " gasped the youth, betrayed by astonishment into 
his native tongue for a moment. " Can't you come around to my room, 
your own house, as I should say in Peru. You probably haven't seen 
the latest copy of the ' Alumnus ' ? " 

" Nor the twenty latest ones. With the greatest of pleasure." 

In spite of myself I found my tongue translating the set Castilian 
phrases I had so long been using, instead of falling into the colloquial- 
isms of my own land. When I was ensconced in an American arm- 
chair battered with the evidence of a long journey and of the crude un- 
loading facilities of West Coast ports, surrounded by walls hidden 
under banners and photographs that seemed to turn the adobe chamber 
into a college dormitory transported to the wilds of the Andes, the 
youth went on: 

" The government of Peru gives four betas, that is, sends yearly an 
honor student to each of four American universities, with an allow- 
ance of a hundred dollars a month. . . ." 

" That is, you had $4800 for the course at Michigan ? " 

" Yes, with traveling expenses. You probably had about the same 
allowance ? " 

277 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

" Fortunately not, or I should long since have been gracing some 
home for inebriates. And is this just a present from the govern- 
ment ? " 

" No ; on our return we must serve the government for three years 
at the same salary. I am superintendent of schools in this and the 
neighboring province of Huamachuco." 

The son of a Scandinavian father, Traverso had evidently over- 
come the handicap of an allowance the spending of which would have 
consumed the entire energies of a full-blooded Latin-American, and 
had brought back a real education. His shelves were filled with the 
latest treatises on pedagogy, in several languages, and a brief acquaint- 
ance was enough to show that he was earnestly striving to instill some 
new life into the moribund system of his native land. 

" But what 's the use ? " he concluded gloomily, casting aside a care- 
fully worked out plan of study. " A man's wings are clipped before 
he can start to fly. Theoretically I have full authority over school 
matters in my two provinces ; practically I can't alter by a hair the 
benighted medieval routine of studies, interwoven at every turn by the 
lives of the saints, that Peru has stumbled along under for centuries. 
I can't fire a fifteen-dollar-a-month numskull up in one of the mountain 
villages, even though he doesn't know whether Chile is in New York 
or in Europe. The priests have their wires attached to every govern- 
ment leg and arm in the country, and I feel like a man lying by, bound 
hand and foot, watching our children being criminally assaulted. The 
money the government spends on us might as well be chucked into the 
Pacific." 

" To say nothing of squandering on one student what would easily 
suffice for three," I put in. 

" Caramba, it is true ! In Ann Arbor life is calm and quiet ; but you 
ought to see what some of the betados who are sent to Paris and Rome 
bring back with them ! Valgame Dios ! " 

The valley of Cajabamba leans decidedly to the west, whence the 
next day was largely one of mounting. But the region is so high that 
climbing was not laborious in the invigorating mountain air that cuts 
into the lungs like strong wine; and even a man inclined to that 
frailty could not have felt lonely with so much of the world spread 
out in plain sight about him. There were few long spaces without 
houses or pack-trains. Once I fell in with a government chasqui driv- 
ing a horse and an ass laden with sacks of mail, among which stood 

278 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

out one marked conspicuously: ' '. „ The correspondence, he 

assured me, was not bound for the " exterior," but was merely local 
matter between towns of the route that had been farmed out to 
him, a statement that was confirmed at the next post-office. 

A mighty crack in the earth, into and out of which the trail zig- 
zagged like some badly wounded creature, marked my exit at last from 
the department of Cajamarca into that of Libertad. The ancient Inca 
highway is said to have followed this same route over these high, un- 
dulating plains, but there were no certain vestiges of it. In the late 
afternoon I burst suddenly out upon a broad view of the famous old 
city of Huamachuco, much like Quito in setting, though more dreary, 
backed by a ragged, black range, half cut off by a nearer slope, that 
might have been Pichincha itself, the two peaks streaked with the first 
snow I had seen since leaving central Ecuador. 

Traverso had given me a note of introduction to his compadre, Dr. 
Alva, the medico titular of Huamachuco. As government doctor, the 
only physician, indeed, within two hard days' ride in any direction, he 
drew — theoretically, at least — a salary of $150 a month, exceeding 
even that of the haughty subprefect. The " son " of a hamlet far up 
in the hills, he was a plain, earnest, little man with a heart several 
times larger than the average of his fellow-countrymen. From his 
lips the stereotyped " Here you are in your own house " had real mean- 
ing. His library included Spanish editions of Taine, Nietzsche, Emer- 
son — and Roosevelt; his phonograph was of high grade and his 
records well chosen. Edison was his ideal of manhood — indeed, a 
straw vote in the Andes would certainly show the " wizard of Orange " 
the most popular American — and he was wont to boast jokingly that 
his own name was the same as one of those of the inventor, " showing 
that some of our ancestors were the same." Toward the end of my 
stay I discovered that the doctor, having installed me in his well-fur- 
nished " guest-room," was himself huddling out the cold nights on a 
bag of straw and a wooden table in the mud den behind his " office." 

It was not until we had grown rather well acquainted that Dr. Alva 
confided to me the fact that he had " worked his way " through the 
medical school of Lima, " even acting as waiter, sefior, in a f onda, 
and working in the summer like any peon. But don't whisper a word 
of this to anyone in Peru," he implored, as if he suddenly regretted 
having taken me into his confidence. 

279 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

" Up in my country those of us who did that are inclined to boast 
of it," I laughed. 

" Ah, si, senor, I know," he answered in an undertone, glancing 
cautiously about him, " I know ; even Tomas Alva Edison was a news- 
boy. But if Huamachuco ever hears of it I shall be a social outcast, 
ranked with the Indians of the market-place." 

Huamachuco derives its name, if local authority is trustworthy, 
from the Quichua words huama (snow) and chuco (cap), the peak 
behind the town having in earlier centuries been completely snow- 
topped. It is the " Guamachuco " of Prescott, to which Hernando 
Pizarro was sent soon after the capture of Atahuallpa, to investigate 
the rumor that an army was being raised to rescue the imperial prisoner. 
Even to-day its population is largely Indian, among whom the chewing 
of coca leaves is general — the first place south of Almaguer in Colom- 
bia of which this could be said. 

But the Huamachuco of to-day does not exactly coincide with that 
of Pizarro's time. The effete descendants of a more hardy race have 
crawled down into a sheltering valley, leaving uninhabited the ancient 
" city of the Gentiles " on the mountain above. A local editor, ap- 
parently for no better reason than the pleasure of basking in a gringo 
smile, offered to serve me as guide. A stony road flanked ever higher 
along a perpendicular rock-wall, then rose and fell over lofty undula- 
tions, and at some six miles from the modern town brought us to the 
first ruins. Far below, across a deep quebrada, lay, like a relief map, 
the great rectangle of a ruined city, in perfect squares, the roofless 
stone gables standing forth in fantastic array above a forest ot low 
trees. This was Viracochapampa, or " Plain of the Nobles," the resi- 
dent city at the time of the Conquest. Through its broad central street 
passed the great Inca highway from Quito to Cuzco. 

But that was the least important part of ancient Huamachuco. Here 
on the barren mountain-top stood in olden times Marca-Huamachuco, 
protecting the dwelling-place on the stony plain below. Above the 
modern town are still to be found remnants of the cuchilla, or stone 
trough by which the ancient race brought water to this lofty summit by 
some system that has been lost in the haze of time. About us, as we 
advanced, rose ruin after stone ruin of what had evidently been an 
elaborate series of fortresses. These spread mile upon mile across the 
rugged, undulating tableland, some densely interwoven with brambles 
and impenetrable thickets, all surrounded by the utter silence of a world 
long since abandoned by man and brute. Indeed, the place was less 

280 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

remarkable for its construction than for the vast extent of the ruins. 
Several large edifices, square or triangular in shape, were built of huge 
blocks of stone, still in the same form in which they might have been 
found as mountain boulders, and, unlike the fortress of Ingapirca, no- 
where nicely fitted together. On the contrary, nearly every joint was 
filled in with chips of stone, and in the thick interior walls had been 
used a sort of crude concrete, now mere gravelly mud that could be 
picked out with the fingers. Whether Marca-Huamachuco was built 
by an earlier people, or by a more careless tribe of the race that left be- 
hind the cut-stone palaces of Cuzco, their method of construction did 
not make for durability. The ruins were all serrated and tooth- 
shaped, with only here and there a jagged point suggesting the original 
height, the whole cutting the far-off horizon with a fantastic, broken 
sky-line. An enormous wall had evidently once surrounded the en- 
tire peak, and beyond, set close together, was a series of almost round 
fortresses, each of three stone walls, one inside the other. One more 
carefully constructed edifice gave evidence of having been the chief 
palace, and from it stretched an unobstructed view of all the surround- 
ing landscape, in which an advancing enemy might have been sighted 
league upon league away in any direction. 

It was in Huamachuco that the first hint of what later proved to be 
amoebic dysentery overtook me, recalling to memory the medicine-case 
I had abandoned in Cuenca as a useless burden. A disturbing lack of 
energy settled upon me, my appetite failed — a startling symptom, in- 
deed — and I felt as if I had inadvertently swallowed one of the largest 
ruins of Marca-Huamachuco. It was with no rousing pleasure, there- 
fore, that I set off, laden with hard-boiled eggs and a supply of the 
stony local bread, on the lonely twelve-league tramp that intervenes 
between the residence of Dr. Alva and the next town. 

Four leagues south, the well-marked road swung to the right and, 
wading the shallow Huamachuco river, I struck off for Trujillo and 
comparative civilization on the coast. The faint path to the left bore 
me even higher across an uninhabited world, dreary with its endless ex- 
panse of dead-yellow ichu. Here were distinct remnants of the old 
Inca highway. For several miles across the undulating paramo the 
way lay between two rows of stones, set upright a considerable distance 
apart, and enclosing a space wide enough for six or seven carriages, 
had they existed, to pass abreast. If, as the inhabitants of the region 
assert, this is a good example of that great military highway of the 
Incas, the descriptions of chroniclers and historians have far outdone 

281 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the reality. Gomara reports it " twenty-five feet wide, cut in a straight 
line from the living rock, or made of stone and lime, turning aside 
neither for mountains nor lakes." Prescott speaks of " highways care- 
fully constructed of cut slabs of freestone and porphyry," which only 
proves how incompetent to judge things South American is the most 
competent man who has not been there in person. Those who have 
visited Spain know how easily the title " camino " is granted, and the 
Conquistadores, like the Peruvians of to-day, having in many cases 
probably never seen a real road, had no means of comparison. Cer- 
tainly this Inca highway had nothing to justify the extravagant praise 
of those who compared it to the old Roman roads. The most that had 
been done in the way of road building was to clear the plain of loose 
rocks — in conspicuous contrast to the modern Peruvians, who look 
upon a road as a convenient place to toss the stones picked up in their 
fields. Stone-heaps here and there along the Andes mark forever the 
routes of travel of Inca days, but they are chiefly achapetas, piles 
thrown up by travelers, who tossed upon them, as votary offering, a 
cud of coca. Of the tambos, rest-houses maintained at frequent inter- 
vals by the imperial government, like the dak bungalows of India, not 
even the ruins of one in a hundred remain standing, and the traveler 
of to-day is far more exposed to the elements than in the times of the 
Incas. 

The Andes rise ever higher from north to south and from west to 
east, whence I was far above Huamachuco when I dragged myself into 
the " Vaqueria Angasmarca," a cluster of cobblestone hovels barely 
four feet high, home of an Indian cow-guard, in one of the most 
dreary, stony settings in South America. Unable to get even hot 
water, I dared not eat the heavy iiambre I carried. I had huddled for 
hours on a stone under the projecting roof when, after dark, the 
vaquero himself rode in from Huamachuco. Having been a soldier, 
trained to a bit less immobility of temperament than his mate, he was 
partly cajoled, partly deceived, into ordering her to serve me a gourdful 
of potato soup, prepared under circumstances better imagined than de- 
scribed. For a long time he replied with dogged, apathetic persistence 
that he " only gave posado in the corredor," but I succeeded at last in 
inducing him to furnish me a ragged blanket in a corner of his own sty, 
on the earth floor of which huddled the entire family and the customary 
menagerie of small animals. 

The traveler who crawls out, blue with cold, after a night in one of 
these cobble caves of the highland Indian, to squat against the eastern 

282 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

wall until a gourd of warm water, savored with corn and the dung-fuel 
over which it is slowly half-heated, is thrust out at him, no longer won- 
ders that the aboriginals of the Andes worshipped the sun. Every 
step of that day of excruciating climbs and stony descents, across 
dreary paramos on which I several times lost my way, was a bitter 
struggle ; for all the demands of the will, my legs could not push me 
forward two miles an hour, and ever and anon they seemed to turn to 
straw and dropped me suddenly to the ground. All the visible world 
lay high and treeless now, with touches of snow on several black, 
shark-tooth peaks of the Cordillera to the eastward. During the day 
I had passed several more remnants of the old Inca highway, two con- 
tinuous lines of weather-blackened upright stones set far apart on 
either side of a space a full half-block wide. Toward sunset the trail 
began to descend into a stony river-valley, far down which I made 
out a tiled building among eucalyptus trees. A passing horseman care- 
lessly answered my question, while more engrossed in my appearance, 
by assuring me it was the hacienda house I was seeking ; and I toiled a 
half-hour up the mountainside to it, only to have the solitary Indian 
female who occupied it point out far below, in the valley of the river, 
the " patron's " house of the " Hacienda Angasmarca." 

It was the most imposing country dwelling I had yet seen in Peru ; a 
large village and two churches clustered about it, the entrance like 
that to some rough old medieval palace, the swarms of dependents 
carrying the mind back to feudal days. Around an immense flower 
and shrub-grown patio, in which Indian hostlers were struggling to un- 
load a score of mules and horses, were some thirty rooms, each with a 
number above the door. I did not learn whether it was the custom of 
the owner to collect hotel charges, but the establishment was con- 
ducted in as heartless and impersonal a manner as if he did. He was 
a snarly old invalid who crawled about with a cane, growling orders to 
his cringing Indians, and too much taken up with his own infirmities 
to waste sympathy on others. With a grunt he thrust my letter of in- 
troduction into a pocket, ordering an Indian to unlock one of the num- 
bered rooms. Stagnant with the atmosphere of a cheap hotel, it con- 
tained a bed with leather springs, a billowy mattress, and a sack of 
ichu as pillow, and only after a long struggle did I obtain a bowl 
of soup filled with tough beef and half-cooked yuca and potatoes, a 
dish barely endurable to a strong man in full health. It was late 
next morning before infinite patience won me a bowl of hot milk, 
and I dragged myself away almost due north. Across the world 

283 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

south of " Angasmarca " yawned a bottomless valley, beyond which a 
rocky mountain-wall rose to the very heavens. The road which should 
have followed in that direction was left to sneak out like some hunted 
thing for a vast detour, even before it began to crawl away eastward at 
right angles to the way I would have gone. At the outset was a la- 
borious, stony climb, from the summit of which the " Hacienda Tulpo " 
lay in plain sight, but across one of those heartbreaking gashes in the 
earth so frequent in the Andes. On the left stood sharp, stark snow- 
peaks of the Cordillera, which seemed to grow mightier with each day 
southward. Noon had long since passed, yet there were barely eight 
miles behind me when I entered the general store of an hacienda build- 
ing forming a hollow square around a dreary barnyard. The shop- 
keeper announced himself the owner of the estate — plainly by poetic 
license. There is a careful graduation of caste in the Andes that makes 
it easy for the experienced traveler to set any man's place in the local 
society. This fellow's dress, color, his familiar yet commanding man- 
ner toward the Indians who sneaked in all that Saturday afternoon to 
dawdle about the counter and buy bits of trash, draughts of native 
" rot-gut," anything the place afforded except what might have been of 
some use to them, generally on credit, thus lengthening their slavery to 
the estate, all gave the lie to his assertion. But for all his posing, he 
turned out a kindly fellow. He not only sold me a half-dozen eggs — 
in itself a great kindness in the Andes — but dragged down from a 
shelf a sort of chafing-dish and light-boiled them. When I had drunk 
these, surrounded by a solid wall of stony-faced Indians who seemed to 
consider the feat remarkable, I still could not bestir myself to push on. 
By and by my eyes, wandering aimlessly over the stock that covered 
two walls to the ceiling, caught sight of a familiar ten-cent can of Amer- 
ican tomatoes. I bought them at sixty cents. Long after an old 
woman had carried off the precious empty can, the shopkeeper spent 
all the leisure left him by the sluggish flow of now half -intoxicated 
Indians in thumbing over great sheaves of foreign bills of lading, and 
at length handed me thirty cents, with the announcement that he had 
inadvertently charged me for the " whole shipment " — of two cans ! 
When the dreary afternoon had at last dragged its leaden way into 
the past tense and chill sunset was creeping across this lofty world, 
I mentioned to the shopkeeper that I needed a spot on which to spend 
the night. The idea evidently had never occurred to him. The estate 
was mine, and all the wonders thereof — but for all that two more 
endless hours passed before a drink-saucy Indian led me to an icy 

284 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

harness-room and pointed out two bare saddle-pads on the earth 
floor. 

Certainly that man is a fool who sets out on a trip down the Andes 
for pleasure; for after the first joys of roughing it have worn off, no 
more monotonously pleasureless existence is conceivable. There is, to 
be sure, a certain feeling of exclusiveness, a certain satisfaction in liv- 
ing through hardships, of moving by one's own efforts over those parts 
of the earth where modern means of transportation are unknown; but 
even this soon wears off, and with the dreary sameness of each day 
the journey becomes chiefly a waste of time and effort, and a never- 
ending disappointment. 

In the morning I crawled away along a world growing ever higher, 
until suddenly it fell abruptly into a chasm out-chasming anything I 
had yet seen in my worst nightmares. Across it, so high even from 
this height that it seemed not of our world, a town was pitched on the 
very tip of a gashed and haggard range. Fortunately my route 
seemed to lead off down the valley, and I was finding some grains of 
comfort in not having to ascend to that heavenly dwelling-place of man, 
whatever it might be called, when a passing horseman sapped my last 
drop of ambition by telling me it was Pallasca — exactly the place in 
which I must spend the night! 

A long time had passed before I coaxed myself to creep slowly on, 
avoiding the view of the task before me as a criminal about to be exe- 
cuted might shade his eyes from the scaffold. An unconscionable 
distance down in the bottomless intervening valley, yet still high, I 
met the first foreign tramp I had yet seen on the road in South Amer- 
ica. He was an Austrian of fifty, looking in his matted, lusterless hair 
and beard, and his drooping rags, like a corpse that had arisen for a 
stroll. 

" Gehen Sie nicht weiter — Go no further south," he pleaded weakly. 
" There everyone is dying of dysentery. Turn back with me to Tru- 
jillo and humanity." 

His illness had reached that stage when the invalid sees the leering 
head of disease rising on all sides, and fancies he may run away from 
what he carries with him. I could not, naturally, abandon a plan of 
years' standing merely because of a temporary disability, and when 
we had exchanged some bits of road information each crawled slowly 
on his way. 

In the hamlet of Mollepata, near the bottom of the quebrada, an old 
woman stirred herself to brew me some herb tea, into which she put 

285 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

a branch of ajenjo (wormwood) with the assurance that this was a 
quick and certain cure for my ailment. The descent had been bad 
enough ; the climb out of that breathless gash in the earth was probably 
the most dismal experience of my career ; I had not, to that day, nor do 
I expect again during this life, to accomplish a more bitter task than 
that struggle in intermittent rain, under my leaden load and Turkish- 
bath poncho, from the tablachaca, or earth-covered stick-bridge across 
the gorge-cut river forming the northern boundary of the department 
of Ancachs, to heaven-hung Pallasca. To make matters worse, the 
natives were united in the assertion that the source of my trouble was 
my habit of drinking at streams along the way ; that at this altitude the 
water was not only too cold, but held in solution many minerals that 
made it unsafe. Long afterward I had reason to believe that this had 
little to do with the matter. But ready at the time to grasp at any 
straw, I threw away the film-tin that had served me as drinking vessel, 
resolved that not another drop of " raw " water should pass my 
lips — or at least my throat. The resolution called for every ounce of 
will-power. One of the chief pleasures of a walking trip had always 
been to quench my thirst whenever opportunity offered. Now the 
mountain rivulets that babbled down across my trail were tantalizing 
beyond belief, and I would gladly have given a gold sovereign — as 
long as they lasted — to have been able to drink my fill at each with 
impunity. Worst of all, there were no substitutes for water to be had, 
neither fruits, prepared drinks, nor any other relief from torture. On 
the day we sailed from Panama a Zone doctor had warned Hays and 
me, as the first and primary rule of the journey before us, always to 
boil our water. He little guessed the difficulty, not to say impossibility, 
of obeying that apparently simple commandment in the Andes. 

Black night had long since fallen when I dragged myself into the 
central plaza of Pallasca, silent and dark except in the densely packed, 
candle-lighted church. A dimly illuminated shop on a far corner 
proved to be a tavern. My thirst had reached the point where drink 
was imperative, though the sentence were sudden death. I ran my 
eye over the shelves. 

" There is wheesky ingles," wheedled the wooden-brained keeper, 
" and rhum Jamaica, or French absinthe, or . . ." 

"Have you anything non-alcoholic?" I croaked. 

" Como no, sefior ! There is wine, and beer from Lima . . ." 

In South America anything short of forty-percent alcohol does not 
count as such ; even the law does not rate beer and wine " alcoholic 

286 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

liquors." There being nothing better, I pointed out a bottle bearing 
the stamp of a Lima brewery. 

The sentence was not exactly sudden death, but that may be because 
I had grown calloused to similar hardships. This Peruvian imitation 
of a German " dark " beer was thick and black as crude molasses, bit- 
ter as cascarilla bark, and more nauseating than old-fashioned medi- 
cine. With only the edge of my thirst blunted, I forced the rest of the 
bottle upon a bystander, not maliciously, but because I knew that a life- 
time in the Andes had hardened him to anything; and turned to the 
question of lodging. 

"You come right along with me," cried the grateful bystander, 
smacking his all-enduring lips. " You will stop with the sefior cura, 
like all travelers of importance." 

But the sefior cura was in no condition to receive guests. In his 
large, over-furnished parlor around the corner the padre lay on a 
couch, the slouch hat over his red-bandaged head and a two-weeks' 
lack of shave giving him a startling resemblance to the Spanish bandits 
of operatic fancy. 

" No, compadre; I am sick, and I cannot give lodging," he replied to 
every plea of my officious sponsor. 

The several persons in the room entered into a whispered confer- 
ence. Some time later I was aroused from my lethargy, and my 
cicerone and a light-haired youth led the way across the black plaza 
and up a steep, cobbled street which my legs all but refused to navigate 
under my heavy load — for though he would not leave a man who had 
treated him to the luxury of a glass of beer from the capital at a fabu- 
lous price until he had seen him safely housed, neither the bystander 
nor his companion could sink their baggy-kneed caste to the depth of 
carrying a bundle in the public street, even on a dark night. 

When morning dawned I found myself rolled up in a heap of blan- 
kets on the earth floor of a long-disused parlor. Hours passed without 
a human being appearing. I pulled myself together and shuffled out 
into the patio of an immense, dilapidated house at the tiptop of the 
town, overlooking half a world and swept by all the winds of heaven. 
Pallasca has been likened to alforjas, so like a pair of saddlebags on 
the rump of a pack-animal does it hang down the two sides of a lofty 
nose of the range. Across the void, deep-blue in spite of the penetrat- 
ing glare of the Andean sunshine, the Cordillera had tumbled her 
mountains recklessly in a tumultuous heap, as if the Builder of the 
world had left here his surplus of materials. The Andes have little of 

287 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the color and varied charm of the Alps; but in awesome grandeur, and 
repulsive, savage mightiness they dwarf the latter by comparison. In 
a room down on the sunken street on which opened the patio zaguan, 
the light-haired youth and his brother kept the town drugstore. They 
were the sons of a German who had married in Peru, yet only their 
more robust frames and greater physical virility distinguished them 
from the common run of natives; in temperament they were as thor- 
oughly what the Canal Zoner calls " Spig " as the most enemic of their 
fellow-townsmen. The older was an amateur doctor — with the ac- 
cent on the adjective — the only one for scores of miles around. He 
prepared me a half-dozen obleas, — those saucer-shaped capsules of the 
Andean pharmacopoeia — of bismuth, prescribed a diet of chochoca 
molida — the Quichua-Spanish name for a thin cornmeal gruel — 
which might be substituted by chufio ingles, a sickly-sweet liquid starch 
— or wheat or rice soup, and assured me that I would be completely 
recovered in the morning. All the articles of diet were contingent on 
the possibility of getting the ingredients, which in the Andes is a 
distinct contingency. For thirst I was advised to take only boiled 
water with cinnamon or cimarruba bark; but even to get the former 
cost a constant struggle with the apathetic servants, and the necessity 
of dragging myself down to the stream on a corner of the plaza to 
cool the boiling pot. 

Later in the day, while I lay contemplating the immense distance 
across the room, a young rag-patch came to say that the cura wished to 
see me. The mere novelty of a man of the cloth desiring my presence 
was so astonishing that it lent a bit of stiffness to my legs. I rose and 
wandered down across the main plaza, from the further side of which 
the world falls precipitously away into unfathomable void. 

The unshaven papist still wore his slouch hat, and by day his bandit- 
like aspect was increased by a complexion like unpolished chamois- 
skin. He motioned me to a chair beneath the lithograph of a ravish- 
ing nude figure advertising a foreign brand of irettes, and trusted, 
with all the smoothness of which the Spanish .ngue is capable, that 
I had not misunderstood his inhospitality of lie night before. Grad- 
ually I turned the conversation to the history of his native region. He 
had made a serious study of the pre-Conquest period, and was sure that 
the Indians lived in just such unwashed misery under the Ir ., as to- 
day. Only, as each group of ten had its commander, who set its tasks 
and carried his investigations into the very bosom of the family, they 

288 



.£§' 




Detail of the ruins of " Marca-Huamachuco, " high up on the mountain above the modern 
town of that name. They are reputed to be at least iooo years old 








Pallasca, to which I climbed from one of the mightiest quebradas in the Andes, sits on the 
tiptop of the world and falls sheer away at a corner of its plaza into a fathomless void 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

were not then so unspeakably lazy. I had started to take my leave 
after some desultory remarks on my journey, during which he desired 
to know if I had walked all the way from Europe, when the priest 
remarked : 

" Before going you will allow me to give you a little remembrance ? " 

" Como no ! Gracias," I answered, fancying the good-hearted old 
fellow was about to favor me with a tin crucifix or a bottle of holy 
water. 

He sat up slowly and, pulling open a drawer of his massive home- 
made desk, took out five silver soles ($2.50), and held them toward me. 

" Mil gracias, no, senor," I cried in astonishment. 

" Tomaselos — take them as a memento," he persisted, attempting 
to thrust the coins into my pocket. Plainly he regarded my refusal a 
mere preliminary formality to save my face. So ingrained is the 
Latin-American notion that no man exerts himself physically, except 
under compulsion, that, for all my explanations, he still cherished the 
idea that I traveled on foot because I had not the means to travel 
otherwise. Nor did I avoid his proposed charity without a great waste 
of flowery Castilian, and for all that left him somewhat offended. 
Even the sons of the misled German could not be made to under- 
stand why I had refused the proposed benefaction. " Andarines " of 
the Peyrounel variety have given these isolated towns of the Andes the 
impression that all foreigners arriving on foot were " living on the 
country." Tramps, in our sense of the word, are unknown in the 
Andes. The few foreign " beach-combers " who reach Peru rarely 
get beyond Lima, and the Indians still cling to the Inca rule — though 
they may no longer know that an Inca ever existed — of each man 
sticking pertinaciously to his own birthplace. It is as impossible for 
the American to realize the absolute lack of anything approaching 
wanderlust in the Andean, and his dread of moving away from his 
native pueblo, as it is for the Indian to understand why the American 
is so far from home. Even among the more or less educated officials 
I could not shake off the title " andarin." More than one rural 
" authority " showed himself aggrieved because I did not ask for his 
testimonal, seal, and signature, fancying himself slighted as of too little 
importance. Many another assured the gaping bystanders: 

" Ah, ganan un platal, esa gente — Those fellows win a wad of 
money ! When he gets back, his government will give him a great 
prize, at least 300,000 soles for the trip, sefiores." 

289 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

A prize, indeed! As if there were not a prize at every turn of the 
winding trail, in every new vista of tumultuous nature under the clear 
metalic blue of the highland sky ! 

I determined to push on next morning, for Pallasca was no nearer 
recovery than my journey's end. The diluted Germans had prom- 
ised to have an Indian carrier ready at dawn. But they were true 
Peruvians. The morning was half gone when I gave up in disgust 
and set out alone. At the zaguan, however, a fishy-eyed Indian rose to 
his feet to say that he had been sent by the gobernador to " assist " 
me, and I piled my bundle upon him forthwith. 

Though Pallasca seems to perch on the very summit of the world, 
the trail managed to find another range to climb. Scores of cold, 
crystal-clear streams babbled tantalizingly across my path. A cosmic 
wilderness of gaunt and haggard mountains, here throwing forward 
bare and repulsive outliers, there weirdly decorated with shadow- 
pictures of clouds and jutting headlands, lay tumbled on every hand 
as far as the eye could range. The Indian chewed coca constantly, 
pausing frequently to dip a bit of lime from the gourd he carried at his 
waist, and appeared to have as little energy as I. When we had 
crawled some six miles, and a scattered hamlet was visible about as far 
ahead, with a deep gash of the earth between, he began to complain of 
pains, and finally lay down in the trail. I did not regret the halt, but 
when I had waited a half-hour and his groans still sounded, I sought to 
urge him on. It was useless. Whether he was really ailing — and 
Sunday may have left him with what is technically known in sporting 
circles as a " hang-over " — or was merely taking this means of shirk- 
ing an unwelcome task, now we were far enough away so that I was 
not likely to return to complain to the gobernador, arguments and 
threats moved him exactly as they would have the rocks on which he 
writhed. Consigning him to the nethermost regions, I struggled to my 
feet under my harness and staggered on down the stony bajada. 

Hours afterward, utterly exhausted by the short dozen miles, I en- 
tered the mud hamlet of Huandoval, expecting a miserable night on 
the earth floor of some icy dungeon hut. It was not quite so bad as 
that. At the first doorway where I paused to inquire for the goberna- 
dor, a half-Indian young woman of unusual Andean intelligence offered 
me lodging where I stood. The baked-mud den was as dreary as usual, 
but in a corner stood a bare slat bedstead, half-buried under an im- 
mense heap of potatoes. Early as it was, I spread my poncho and lay 
down, anticipating a welcome repose — only to discover that I was 

290 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

lodged in the Huandoval telephone exchange ! On the wall hung an 
aged Errickson instrument, the strange vagaries of which brought the 
chola in upon me as often as its jangle sounded. The place, too, 
like telephone exchanges the world over, was exceedingly popular with 
the young men of the town, and when my rest was not being broken by 
some mistaken call from another exchange, it was disrupted by the 
labored wit of some rural Lothario. 

It is but eight miles from Huandoval to Cabana, capital of the 
province; yet it required nine hours of the most concentrated effort, 
both mental and physical, to drive myself over the low, barren ridge 
that separates the two towns. The story of the next few days, trivial 
in detail, I give in no spirit of complaint, but merely because it sheds 
so direct a light on the character of the Andean Peruvian. I had 
learned that there was a hospital in Huaraz, the department capital, 
and requested the subprefect of Cabana to use his authority to help me 
hire a horse, as he was in duty bound to do by the official orders I 
carried. 

" Pierda cuidado," orated the thin, angular fellow, peering at me 
with his short-sighted squint, " the government will furnish you a horse 
and all that is needed." 

Nobody wanted the government to furnish me anything, but I did 
not stop to argue the matter. My entire attention was taken up just 
then with resisting the efforts of the " authorities " to throw me into a 
dank mud den, under the allegation that it was a lodging. Fortunately 
there was some one else than Peruvians in the town. It was through 
the village priest that I won at last a second-story room above the pre- 
fectura, of mud floor in spite of its elevation, supported on poles that 
yielded to the tread. He was a tall, powerfully-built Basque of fifty, 
with a massive Roman nose and, in memory of his mountainland, a 
boina set awry on his head and matching his long, flowing gown only 
in color. He had suffered from the same ailment during his first year 
in this foreign land and was sure he knew an instant cure — and in- 
stead of merely talking about it, like a native, he sent a man to prepare 
it. This was a half-bottle of wine boiled with the bark of a mountain 
tree called the cimarruba; but whatever effectiveness it might have 
possessed was offset by the impossibility of keeping to a proper diet, 
or even of getting boiled water to drink. There was no doctor in 
Cabana ; yet all Cabana posed as physicians. Now some fellow would 
drop in to say, " the very best thing you can eat is pork-chops," and he 
would scarcely be out of sight before another paused to assure me that 

291 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

pork-chops would kill me within an hour. " Eat the whites of eggs," 
cried another. " You can eat almost anything," asserted the next 
comer, " except the whites of eggs." Again the room would be dark- 
ened by a shadow in the doorway, and a man would step forward to 
say, " Now here is an old Indian woman from up in the mountains 
whose grandfather's nephew died of dysentery, and . . ." 

All night the town boomed with fireworks, the howling of dogs, the 
bawling of drunken citizens, and the atrocious uproar of a local " band," 
for it was the eve of something or other. Far from finding the prom- 
ised horse waiting for me at dawn, I did not see the shadow of a person 
until after ten. Then a stupid, insolent soldier came to ask if I 
wanted " breakfast." At twelve he had not returned. I dragged my- 
self down to the plaza. The subprefect and all his henchmen were 
making merry in a pulperia. I requested him to have some one pre- 
pare me food, at any price. Price? They were horrified ! Of course 
they could not think of letting me pay for anything. I was the guest 
of Cabana. They would obsequiar me a " magnificent meal " at once, 
cried the subprefect, tying himself in several knots in his excess of 
courtesy. What would I like, roast lamb with eggs, a fine steak with 
. . . No, I would be completely satisfied with a bowl of gruel. Ah ; 
certainly, I should have it at once, and a basket of fruit, and . . . and 
there they dropped the matter, until the priest, discovering my plight, 
well on in the afternoon, sent up a dish of rice gruel. 

Everything does not come to him who waits in the Andes, and I 
descended again to mention the word " horse " to the now reeling sub- 
prefect. 

" Have no care," he hiccoughed, " the government will attend to all 
that." 

Knowing he was merely showing off before his fellow-townsmen, 
and that he would really let me lie where I was, or at most furnish me 
some crippled Rozinante to carry me to Tauca, three miles away, I 
refused his putative charity. He turned to the crowd about us with a 
pretense of being hurt to the quick, then sent a boy to summon the half- 
negro gobernador, likewise maudlin with the celebration. 

" Since this senor has declined my offer to furnish him all that is 
needed," stuttered the offended subprefect, " you will have a paid 
horse, with saddle and bridle, ready for him — to-morrow." 

" But why not to-day ? " I protested. 

" Absurd, senor ! To-day is the great Corpus Cristi procession and 

292 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

you would not wish to miss that, even if you could get an Indian to go 
with you." 

The procession, set for mid-morning, started soon after my return 
to my room. From the altar of the church it encircled the plaza and 
returned whence it had come. The route had been carefully scraped 
and swept — evidently for the only time during the year — by ragged 
Indians, forced to contribute this pious labor by the several grades of 
labor-dodging " authorities " howling over them. Then it had been 
spread with a long strip of carpet, after which came scores of barefoot 
women to cover it with a fixed design of flower-petals of all colors. 
Then forth from the mud church issued the Basque priest in cream- 
tinted vestments, his boina and incessant cigarette gone, four Indians 
protecting him from the dull, sunless day by a rich canopy. Proceeded, 
followed, or surrounded by all the bareheaded, drink-maudlin piety 
of Cabana, the distressing " band " blowing itself wobbly-kneed, he 
moved slowly forward, only his own sacred feet touching the carpet, 
women and children pouncing upon the flower petals behind as rapidly 
as they were blessed by his number-eleven tread, and carrying them 
off as sacred relics. Outwardly he seemed sunk in the profoundest 
depths of devotion, yet twice, at a sign from me, he halted the proces- 
sion, as by previous understanding, until I had caught a picture. Over 
the door of the towered mud-hovel into which the throng crowded 
after him were the half-effaced words, " Haec est domus dei et porta 
cieli." No doubt they were right, but it would have been easy to have 
mistaken it for something else. 

Toward evening the subprefect's secretary brought a wooden-minded 
Indian and, introducing him as the owner of a horse, called upon me to 
pay 75 cents at once for the use of it. The moment I had done so he 
produced a still dirtier Indian and, introducing him as my "guide," 
demanded that he be paid fifty cents. That over, the secretary men- 
tioned that it was customary to give a "gratification" to owner and 
" guide," that they might drink my good health for the coming voyage, 
at the end of which, he further hinted, it was costumbre to grant the 
" guide " a real for alfalfa for the animal, and something for himself 
for chicha, and . . . but by that time I had withdrawn to my quar- 
ters. 

At six in the morning I was dressed and ready ; at seven the " guide " 
came to know if he really should bring the horse ; at eight I burst in 
upon the sleeping subprefect to know what had become of his boister- 

293 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

cms promise to have food prepared for me at dawn. A soldier was 
sent to investigate. In due time he came back with the information 
that the cook was not up yet. At nine the " horse " arrived. It was a 
wild, hairy, mountain colt, a bit larger than an ass, which had never 
been shod, curried, or trimmed. The equipment it wore was wholly 
home-made, — a bridle of braided rawhide, without bits, like that with 
which our American Indian rides his mustang, a tiny, crude, wooden 
saddle with one thickness of leather stretched over it, and huge wooden 
box-stirrups. 

" Now let nothing worry you," cried the subprefect, as I bade fare- 
well to the noble city of Cabana, the " guide " trotting on foot behind, 
" I '11 telegraph the gobernador of Corongo and Huaylas and the subpre- 
fect of the next province so that he can telegraph his governors and 
the prefect in Huaraz. No se moleste, seiior; everything will be ar- 
ranged by the government." 

Hours of unbroken climbing brought us to a freezing-cold paramo, 
where flakes of snow actually fell and across the icy lagoons of which 
a wind that penetrated to the marrow swept from off the surrounding 
snow-peaks. So small was my animal that I expected him to drop 
under me at every step, so tiny that his front knees constantly knocked 
the stirrups off my feet, and so wobbly in his movements that it was 
like riding a loose- jointed hobby-horse. At last we caught the valley 
of a descending river, and racked and shaken in every bone, I rode into 
the plaza of Corongo, the near-Indian population of which seemed to 
take a bear-baiting pleasure in the predicaments of others. Evidently 
this was no new characteristic, for Stevenson, writing a century ago, 
states, " Corongo is certainly the most disagreeable Indian town I ever 
entered." 

The gobernador sat gossiping in the mud hut to which the telegraph 
wire led. He had not, however, received any message from Cabana. 
As telegrams cost " authorities " nothing, I had permitted myself to 
hope that at least this promise would be kept. Having no other way of 
getting rid of me, however, the town ruler led the way to his own hovel, 
where long after dark his crude-mannered females prepared me a bowl 
of gruel with which to break an all-day fast. 

The language of Corongo is chiefly Quichua, little in evidence since 
Ecuador, but due from now on to be more general than Spanish. The 
gobernador ran no unnecessary risk of having me left on his hands, 
and by six next morning the owner of a new " horse," an even more 
striking caricature of what he was supposed to represent than that of 

294 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

the day before, had collected his fee and that of the new " guide." 
These paid, he began at once to complain that the animal could not 
travel far without being shod, a luxury which, like his master, he had 
thus far never enjoyed. On the advice of the gobernador I added a 
half-sol for that purpose. Two hours later I raised so effective a pro- 
test against further delay that the animal was dragged in, still unshod, 
as he would be to the end of time, and made ready. The price, more 
or less exorbitant in honor of my helpless situation and gringo blood, 
would not have mattered had not each " authority " stood in cahoots 
with the owners and wasted my time and energy with their clumsy 
grafts. 

Under a brilliant sun we squirmed away out of town, and began a 
sharp descent into one of the mightiest desert gorges in all the Andes, 
my " guide," a stone-headed fellow, speaking only Quichua, who had 
plodded at a horse's tail all his days, slapping along behind me in his 
leather sandals, incessantly feeding himself lime and coca leaves. It 
would have been difficult enough for a man in the best of health to sit 
such an animal standing still on the level; let those who can imagine 
one With barely the strength left to hold himself together riding him 
down shale hillsides, often at a sharp angle, the stirrups knocked from 
his inert feet every few yards. Now the entire range cutting off the 
world on the east was capped with snow, making the scorched and 
thirsty valley the more tantalizing by comparison. On through blazing 
noon I clung to that diminutive brute with his murderous dog-trot, over 
blistered, waterless hills, harsh and repulsive in their barrenness, to 
fetch up at sunset, more dead than alive, in Yuramarca, a scattered 
village of far more chicha-shops than respectable inhabitants. Here, 
instead of the penetrating cold of Corongo, was to be feared the 
fever of the hot lands. The gobernador was a ragged, barefoot Indian 
not over eighteen, one of the few in town who spoke Spanish, and in- 
clined to insolence in consequence. He pointed out a mud cave on 
the plaza as the stopping-place of all travelers. I protested against 
lying on the bare earth. " No hay mas," growled the haughty official. 
Of course there was nothing more ; there never is at the first ten or 
twelve requests among these pitiless aboriginals. An hour's coaxing 
and threatening, nicely interwoven, and the gobernador strolled across 
the plaza and came back with just the thing, — a six by two-foot door, 
covered on one side with zinc. I ordered the " guide " to place the 
saddle in the room, lest he decamp during the night, gave him a medio 
for chicha, a real to buy the tops of sugar-cane for the " horse " — for 

295 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

we were far below the alfalfa line — and sent the gobernador with 
twice the necessary amount to find wheat for a bowl of gruel. To the 
unspeakable old female he ordered to prepare it I paid a large day's 
wages, yet the luke-warm " soup " she delivered long after dark had 
only a spoonful of chaff in it. In the Andes, cooks, workmen, and serv- 
ants appropriate as much as they dare of anything they have to do 
with, and soldier, peon, dog, or cat, each expects to levy his toll on the 
traveler's scanty rations. We of the north do not look kindly upon 
this species of charity, feeling that each should have his food reg- 
ularly from a definite source ; yet the means of avoiding a system 
more deadening in its effect than the " tip " of more advanced com- 
munities is yet to be found. 

Before daylight of a moonlit Sunday morning we were off again 
through the same dreary desert. The sun, having first to climb the 
snow-capped Cordillera, only overtook us as we were crossing the 
decrepit little bridge high above the Santa river, racing through its 
resounding gorge on its way to the Pacific. The endless climb beyond 
was by so narrow a trail along the face of a yawning precipice that 
my saddlebags scraped continually along the mountain wall, and here 
and there a jutting rock thumped me sharply on the knee. At scorch- 
ing high noon we caught sight, between grim, austere mountain flanks, 
of a long, tilted valley lightly covered in all its extent with tiled houses 
among scrub trees, which my peon announced was Huaylas. I had 
heard such rosy reports of this " city " that my oft-disappointed hopes 
grew buoyant again before a view delightful to the eye weary with the 
savage solitudes behind. But it turned out to be but another of those 
bowelless, stone-hearted mountain towns whose ragged inhabitants re- 
mind one of buzzards hovering about a moribund, each snatching what 
he can, as soon as he dares. " Don Ricardo," an anemic, fishy-handed 
dwarf of outwardly white skin, owner of the chief shop of Huaylas, ran 
a sort of amateur hotel at Ritz-Carlton prices. The open-air " dining- 
room " on the back veranda overlooked — as guests likewise struggled 
to do — a jumble of ancient and noisome structures and stable-yards, 
in the most distressing of which a leprous old hag concocted the in- 
edible messes that were poked through a repulsive hole in the wall 
an unconscionable time after they were ordered. The rheumatic and 
dismal den to which I was assigned was below the street level, though 
I could see through the wooden-barred window the brilliant, sunny day 
outside, and catch a glimpse of the serrated line of snow peaks away 
to the east. But the good people of Huaylas, informed in some way 

296 



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DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

of my place of lodging, amused themselves by pounding on the window 
bars, shouting amiable insults in upon me, and now and then tossing 
in clods of earth and an occasional stone that did not always fall short 
of their aim. As I had had no quarrel with the priest, he could not 
have denounced me as a heretic. It must have been simply their 
racial delight in producing or watching suffering, the same trait that 
brings them joy during the sorriest moments of a bull-fight, and causes 
them to gather in crowds to tease and jeer at an idiot or a cripple. 
It was " Taco " who finally came to my rescue. " Taco " was a Japa- 
nese, chief servant of Don Ricardo, and the only really intelligent or 
humane person I had met since walking out of the doctor's house in 
Huamachuco. It was with deep regret that I paid his worthless mas- 
ter for what the servant really furnished. 

The peon who was to start with me at dawn next day was still 
wallowing among the chicha-shops at blazing ten, and I was weakly 
urging a start — for the journey was long — when an imposing 
personage of white skin, wearing a leather cap and real shoes, pushed 
through the jeering throng and announced himself the congressman for 
that district. Having heard my tale of woe, he gave me a card order- 
ing the medico titular of Caraz to admit me to the hospital there, and in 
due time prevailed upon the besotted peon to be off. The order was 
addressed to one Dr. Luis A. Phillips, and vastly buoyed up by the 
promise inherent in such a name, I endured uncomplainingly the rib- 
jolting trot to which the delayed start had sentenced me. 

Town after town had proved such dismal disappointments that I did 
not look forward to Caraz with any overwhelming glee. But my hopes 
rose high when we surmounted one of the countless desert ridges and 
sighted at last a vast, level, though somewhat tilted plain between the 
Santa river and the brilliant white snow peaks of the ever higher Cor- 
dillera, with hundreds upon hundreds of inviting houses specking with 
red its many orchards and checkered green patches of cultivation. 
The Andes rise to appalling heights in these parts, and take on a variety 
of color and form almost comparable to the Alps in beauty, vastly 
outdoing them in a certain wild, somber undomesticated grandeur. 
Under the declining sun the bold and impressive range turned from 
tawny brown to deep purple, then to tender violet and soft lilac as they 
receded, the snowy heads of the peaks seeming to hang suspended in 
the evening sky. The bridge to the north was in ruins, and I had to 
ride more than a mile beyond the town to catch the road from the south 
that carried us at last into the place as the shopkeepers were putting up 

297 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

their wooden shutters. It was almost a city, with evidence of consider- 
able commerce and civilization, great glaciers gazing coldly down from 
the transparent sky of evening into the neat little plaza. 

A considerable percentage of the inhabitants were white in color, 
but this was apparently only skin-deep. At the entrance to the doctor's 
patio I was met by his wife, a well-dressed, auburn-haired woman, 
to all outward appearances educated and civilized. But environment 
is a powerful factor. She differed not in the least from the Indians 
of Corongo. Having informed me with an icy indifference that the 
doctor was " somewhere in the town," she refused even to permit me 
to enter the patio to wait for him. There being nowhere else to go, I 
was forced to remain more than an hour astride the animal I could 
scarcely cling to after eight hours of racking trot. Not a drop of any- 
thing could I get for my raging thirst. Instead, the woman's saucy 
children joined a score of other urchins of the town in crowding around 
me and concocting all manner of annoyances, even to throwing stones 
and striking the horse unawares on the legs, while a score of adults 
looked on from the street corners or their doorways at the " amuse- 
ment." 

At first sight of the doctor, long after dark, my hopes gushed up like 
a spurting geyser, but they fell leadenly to the ground as he opened his 
lips. The son of an Englishman stranded a half-century ago in this 
corner of Peru, he looked as British as any stroller along Piccadilly ; yet 
in speech, manner, and mental processes he was " Spig " to the core. 
With a Latin-American eagerness to be rid of anything suggesting 
labor or annoyance, he asked a few superficial questions, grunted 
twice after the manner of physicians, and led the way down the cob- 
bled street. My habit of picturing in detail every coming scene had 
only been increased by my condition, and I braced myself to enter a 
dismal, barren mud room, with a score of beds filled with foul-tongued 
Peruvian soldiers, in which the pilfering of my possessions would be 
the least of the annoyances awaiting me. I was most agreeably disil- 
lusioned. The hospital at Caraz was a new, whitewashed, pleasant 
little building recently erected by a society of well-to-do inhabitants. 
There were not a half-dozen patients, and in painting my picture I had 
completely overlooked the Andean rules of caste. However nastily 
he may treat him otherwise, the meanest Peruvian would not so far 
forget his training as to put a white man among Indians or negro- 
tainted soldiers. I was given full possession of a long, tile-floored 
room, opening on the flower-decked patio and with a large barred 

298 



DRAWBACKS OF THE TRAIL 

window on the street ; the best chamber in the building, indeed, except 
the director's office. True, the bed was board-floored, and I had to 
ask the caretaker to remove his champion gamecock from the room — 
whereupon he tied him by a leg just outside the door — but who could 
be so cruel as to ask a Peruvian to keep his rooster where he cannot 
gloat over him as he works? 

The doctor came for a minute and a half every morning. The hos- 
pital being a public institution and he a government doctor, he scowled 
at my offer to pay for treatment. The caretaker and especially his 
wife, with a seared and weather-worn face like that of a good-hearted 
old German peasant woman, were kindly if not experienced nurses. I 
could scarcely have fallen upon a finer spot, as nature goes, to be 
" laid on the shelf." Caraz, 7,440 feet above sea-level, was at an ideal 
height as a place of recuperation, its splendid climate tempered and 
clarified by the snowclads above. An open stream made music by 
my window ; the sun was unbrokenly brilliant from the time it crawled 
over the snow-peaks to the east till it dropped behind the western 
ranges. I needed no clock to tell the time of day. It was 7 140 when 
the first golden streak fell upon the whitewashed wall beneath the 
window ; 12 114 when the golden rectangle that marked the open door to 
the patio stood upright ; 2 :20 when the window-bars cast their first 
shadow on the tiled floor; and 5 :io when these, elongated to emaciated 
slenderness, faded away into the purple darkness of evening. Two 
youths of the town dropped in on me one day and brought an ancient 
book of tales ; but it goes without saying that I had no hint of what 
was going on in the wide world beyond the encircling ranges. The 
unique feature of the hospital was that no provision whatever was 
made for patients to wash, even face and hands. Bathing was looked 
upon as highly dangerous to invalids, and it was only after several 
days, and at the expense of much argument, that I finally caused a 
wash-tub of tepid water to be dragged into the room. 



299 



CHAPTER XII 

THE ROOF OF PERU 

FOR a week I improved under the doctor's care. I had already 
strolled once or twice around the neat little plaza, down upon 
which the massive, snowclad peaks gaze with paternal serenity. 
But my legs were still in that woven-straw condition that made my 
feet lead ingots ; and no pleasure quite outdid that of lying abed watch- 
ing the sunshine crawl across the floor, and listening to the keeper's 
rooster challenging the world to combat. I should have regretted a 
controversy with that rooster during those days ; I am sure he would 
have worsted me. 

On Sunday, the first of June, the doctor did not appear; nor the 
next day, nor the next. Medicines and tonics ran out. I decided to 
push on next morning, before what strength I had regained evap- 
orated entirely. But during the night there came upon me a pain 
under which I could only writhe and stuff my throat with bedclothes. 
When I had enjoyed this an hour or two, a brilliant thought struck 
me, — appendicitis ! All the night through — for only the rooster slept 
within shouting distance — I painted fanciful pictures of a grave 
looked down upon by the paternal, serene peaks through the ages to 
come. For it was easy to guess how effectively the surgeons of the 
Andes would surge — with their butcher-knives, sheep-shears and 
ditch-water. In the morning I sent the caretaker to summon the doc- 
tor before he set out on his rounds. About nine he came back to an- 
nounce, in a manner suspiciously sheepish, that the sefior doctor 
medico titular was confined to his bed. As the day wore on the fellow 
overcame his racial lack of initiative to the extent of bringing me a 
potion from the chief botica, but it had little effect. Then all at once 
" Taco," the Japanese of Huaylas, grinned in on me through the bars 
of my window, and a half-hour later the keeper of the drug-shop had 
come in person. 

11 It is congestion of the bowels, sefior," he announced. " These 
pilduras will relieve it. The doctor was to have changed the treatment 
on Sunday to avoid this, but — " 

300 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

" Is the doctor seriously ill ? " I asked. 

" Senor," said the druggist, after a moment of hesitation, " on Sat- 
urday night the medico titular took some liquor at a tertulia. It is 
fatal to him. He cannot stop. It is now four days that he has lain 
mareado" (seasick), " and he has not been able to visit one of his pa- 
tients. Out in the pueblos three have already died ; for there is no 
other doctor." 

I had been ten days in Caraz when, in spite of a soreness within and 
an annoying lack of vigor, I decided to push on afoot. A broad road 
led south along the green and fertile valley of the Santa, shut in on 
either hand by the yellow, terra-cotta flanks of barren mountains as 
between unscalable walls. The way was well-peopled with broad- 
faced, stolid Indians speaking no Spanish, and a felt hat of tobacco- 
color was now taking the place of the dingy " panamas " that had 
been almost universal since southern Ecuador. It was only a sample 
day's walk; eight miles to another provincial capital. But it seemed 
at least twenty, especially as the " perfectly level " road kept mounting 
steadily, for Yungay is a thousand feet higher than Caraz. The snow- 
and-glacier mass of Huascaran, king of that magnificent snow-capped 
range that dwarfs the Alps, bulked menacingly almost sheer above 
the bucolic old plaza, when I plodded across it in the sleepy silence of 
noonday to the dwelling of an unusually simple-hearted subprefect. 

Next morning Yungay stretched for miles along the half-cobbled 
highway, and had scarcely ended when Mancos began. This depart- 
ment of Ancachs and the valley of the Santa is the most densely popu- 
lated region of Peru. The fifteen miles to Carhuaz was what the 
Peruvians call an excellent road ; to a people of wider outlook it would 
have been recognizable as a broad expanse of loose stones undulating 
over barren ridges, relieved by the bracing mountain air from off the 
blue-white bulk of Huascaran, here seeming to hang suspended over- 
head. The water of all this valley is reputed a source of several dread 
diseases, among them the warty verrugas indigenous to Peru. The 
bottle of boiled " tea-water " swinging from my leather harness lasted 
but a few dry miles, and I could only fall back, not without misgiving, 
on chicha, announced for sale by a little red flag before an oc- 
casional hut along the way. The bridge that once lifted the camino 
real across the swift, cold stream at the edge of the green oasis that 
marked the end of the day's tramp had gone the way of most Peruvian 
bridges, and left me to wade waist-deep. Strangely enough, my 
host of Yungay had kept his word to telegraph the gobernador of 

301 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

Carhuaz, and I sat down almost upon arrival with the family at a din- 
ner served after the patriarchal manner of the Andes. To those of us 
at table the wife at the head granted the full meal, from the hot, pep- 
pery soup of Ancachs to the dessert of fried plantains in " honey," — 
melted crude sugar. To the dozen Indian servants squatted along the 
wall she dished out frugally the coarser viands, to each according to 
his station in life, the bedraggled scullion getting only a small gourdful 
of boiled corn and yuca. During our Sunday stroll in the plaza the 
gobernador introduced me in the same careful order to every town 
celebrity, down to the last teniente ; after which we of the elite gathered 
round the town clerk in a corner of the square to hear read the weekly 
" bulletin," from the two-line cable of foreign news " via Lima " to 
the last testimonial to the efficacy of the pills of Dr. Ross as a panacea 
of all earthly misfortunes. 

I was miles south before the first rays of Monday's sun fell upon me, 
and even after that was able to sneak along for hours in the shadow of 
the Cordillera, so closely did it stand above me. Town rapidly suc- 
ceeded town, with miles of almost unbroken house-walls crowding a 
damnably cobbled road to barely the width of a wheeled vehicle. Not 
even along an English highway would more houses have been shops. 
The male population spoke a more or less fluent Spanish, weedy with 
terms from their native tongue; but the women either could not or 
would not use anything but Quichua. The dialect of the region con- 
tained a labor-saving devise in the phrase " A 'onde vueno ? " serving 
for the more specific " Where do you come from and where are you 
going?" of less inventive sections. Not a few took me for a peddler, 
and called out from their doorways, " Que lleva de venta, senor ? " and 
some sent children running after me with a summons to return, lest 
they miss a precious opportunity for long-winded and chiefly futile 
bargaining. Ripened corn was being husked in the narrowing fields 
along the way. The repulsive, flanking ranges crowded closer and 
closer together, squeezing the stony road ever higher, until the hills 
closed in entirely, and a precipitous, barren ridge, cutting off the world 
to the south, left it no choice but to contract to a cobbled street of the 
department capital. The sun was setting when I halted at a corner of 
Huaraz' main plaza, my legs leaden with the twenty-five undulating, 
stony miles behind me, to inquire for that famous hotel rumor had 
pictured for weeks gone by. 

The conviction came upon me that there would not be a hotel even 
in Lima. A citizen of Huaraz did point out to me a building boasting 

302 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

itself the " Gran Hotel," but all it offered was a few rooms to let. 
To me fell that of the zaguan, a prison-like chamber forming a front 
corner of the building ana opening on both the street and the entrance 
to the patio. It had once been the oratorio of a private dwelling, and 
the altar and its decorations were still intact, except that the Virgin 
had flown from her niche. Across the way was a Chinese f onda with 
the same bill of fare, worse cooked, worse served, and more expensive 
than that of Cajamarca. This was the gathering-place of the elite 
among the homeless transients. I had not the courage to investigate 
the dozen other Chinese and native " restaurants " scattered about 
town. 

Huaraz, capital of the most populous department of Peru and the 
largest city I had yet seen since crossing the frontier, is really but an- 
other mud village of the Andes, differing from the rest only in size. 
Its adobe buildings seldom rise above a story and a half in heighth ; its 
rusticated inhabitants, in ragged, comic-opera costumes, the majority 
speaking only Quichua, were for the most part ill-bred and disagreeable 
in manner, especially to " gringos," whose intelligence or cleanliness 
they seemed to resent. Even the small percentage of whites — real 
whites, that is, for there were many who no doubt mistakenly consid- 
ered themselves so — were gaping mountaineers. Window-glass, to be 
sure, was to be found, and there were actually three or four clumsy, 
two-wheeled carts, like the rural wagons of England, the arrival of 
which was no doubt an event in the town history. Foreign residents 
were numerous, especially Chinamen, who owned many of the shops of 
importance, leaving the natives to squat in the street with their few 
cents'-worth of wares. The town itself has nothing " picturesque " 
about it, neither in the color and style of its houses nor the rags of its 
inhabitants ; but this is far more than made up for by the magnificent 
range of snowclad peaks that climb up into the blue all about it, tower- 
ing close above the town on the east and stretching away into the north, 
to end in the enormous blue-white mass of Huascaran. Its climate, 
colder than that of Quito and with a perpetually brilliant sunshine and 
an invigorating crispness to the air, was delightful. There was even 
a shelf of books for sale in one of the larger establishments, though 
the nearest I came to finding literature of the country for the road 
ahead was Bjornson's " Sendas de Dios," whatever it may be called 
in Norwegian. 

Rumor had it that the tramp over the icy Cordillera Central that 
now lay before me would be " impossible," even to a man in the most 

303 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

sturdy condition. To slip down to the coast and sail for Lima would 
have been easy, but a racial obstinacy forced me to pursue to the bitter 
end the task I had set myself, though it promised only the monotony 
of familiar experience and further intercourse with a people that had 
grown utterly antipathetic in habit, feature, and character. An Amer- 
ican resident furnished me a horse and a peon for the first day's jour- 
ney. The prefect had favored me with the customary flowery docu- 
ment to his subordinates along the way, ordering them to " lend me all 
classes of facilities." It would have been far more to the point had 
he commanded them more specifically to assist me to acquire an oc- 
casional plate of beans. The dusty road close along the diminishing 
river was well traveled, chiefly by long donkey trains and plodding, ex- 
pressionless Indians. Huts and even small villages were frequent, 
the barren ranges crowding ever closer and dwindling almost to foot- 
hills, or rather seeming so to dwindle as we mounted ever higher. 
Beyond the bridge that carried us back to the right bank of the Santa 
were scores of little wheat-fields, often hanging far up the steep hill- 
sides; and Indians were threshing the grain by driving their animals 
round and round the circles of hard earth in which it had been spread, 
and tossing it high in the air with wooden shovels until the wind had 
carried away the chaff. The monotonous mud town of Recuay, no- 
torious for its horse-thieves, gazed stolidly upon us as we trotted on to 
Ticapampa, headquarters of a French mining company, the several tall 
chimneys of which were belching their smoke into the brilliant sky, 
their ugliness offset by the first suggestion of industry in Peru. 

It cost me three days and several tramps back to Recuay to find a 
mount for the journey ahead. Walking would have been far less la- 
borious. But there were sixteen leagues of bleak, foodless paramos 
and two snow-topped ranges separating me from the first suggestion 
of habitation on the further side of the great glacier-clad central chain 
of the Andes, that stretched away to north and south further than the 
eye could command, like an impassable barrier set by nature against 
the wilfulness of puny man. 

Fortunately the wife of an Indian of Recuay celebrated that Sun- 
day so effectually that she brought to bed her companions in a drunken 
brawl. The gobernador fined her twenty soles. Her husband pos- 
sessed only ten, and her wails from the adobe carcel were interfering 
with the bargaining in the market-place. Summoned by the walking 
scarecrow who boasted himself the lieutenant-governor, the head of 
the disrupted household admitted, after a wealth of subterfuges, that 

304 




Though within a few degrees of the equators, Huaraz, capital of the most populous depart- 
ment of Peru, has a veritable Swiss setting of snow-clad peaks and glaciers 




Threshing wheat with the aid of the wind. In the few regions of the Andes that are neither 
too high nor too low for this grain, the methods of cultivation are the most primitive 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

he owned two mules in condition for a journey, and the gobernador, 
pocketing " in the name of justice " the sovereign I handed him, or- 
dered the abject husband to be ready at six in the morning to accom- 
pany me to Huallanga. 

Some two leagues further up the contracted valley we crossed the 
now tiny Santa by a bridge of sticks and, catching the gorge of a 
little stream fed by the glaciers above, plunged due east into the moun- 
tains. The sun had burned our faces in the river valley; an hour 
afterward it was cold as late November. Rain began, but quickly 
turned to a mixture of hail and snow. Dusk overtook us at the foot 
of a mighty glacier, though not until we had sighted one of the rare 
shepherd's huts that huddled in an occasional stony hollow. These 
miserable Indian chozas of the upper heights are built of cobble-stones 
heaped up to the height of a dog-kennel and covered with brown ichu 
grass, hardly as large and quite as crude as those the beaver fashions, 
defending their miserable inmates neither from wind nor rain. A 
single room, which can only be entered on hands and knees, houses 
the whole family, whom a sheepskin or two serves as bed, and two or 
three earthen pots as utensils in which to cook their scanty fare over 
an ichu or dried-dung fire in the center of the windowless hovel. 
Totally indifferent to wealth or comfort, with hardly fuel enough for 
cooking purposes, the stolid inhabitants slink into their squalid dens as 
soon as the sun has withdrawn his genial rays, and shiver through a 
night during which they get almost no unbroken sleep. With scarcely 
enough food to keep themselves from starvation, they house swarms of 
mangy curs that curl up among them by night, and which, being never 
fed, dash greedily at any offal, like the pigs of Central America. Here 
there was a second kennel, oval in shape, which the woman permitted 
us to occupy, because she was asked in her own tongue by one of her 
own people. Both she and her half-dozen children were barefoot and 
in scanty garb, yet appeared completely indifferent to the icy cold 
which, if less in degrees than in a Canadian mid-winter, was more 
penetrating. We carried blankets sufficient to pass the night com- 
fortably, huddled close together, but as often as I stepped out into the 
brilliant moonlight in which the ice-fields above us stood forth like fis- 
sured and fantastic ghost-castles, the very marrow in my bones seemed 
to congeal. 

Hoar-frost covered the earth, and ice a half-inch thick lay on the 
stagnant puddles when we set out in the bitter cold dawn across a re- 
gion drear in the extreme. Stiff, stony climbs carried us up to the 

305 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

very edges of immense blue-white glaciers, and through patches of 
snow that threw the sharp rays of the highland sun into our eyes and 
faces like a spray of needles. The day was as laborious as any I 
had ever spent afoot, — thirty-six miles over the wintry, rock-pitched 
double crest of the Central Cordillera on a mule who jolted my unac- 
customed frame to a loose-jointed wreck before I finally slid grate- 
fully to the ground in the bleak mining-town of Huallanga. This was 
a slight oasis of imported life in a wild, almost uninhabited region, the 
Peruvian mine-manager of which was extraordinary from at least two 
points of view, — he was blond as a Norseman, and so advanced in his 
customs that I dared even address his wife directly at table. 

Next day I joined — for a decided consideration — the caravan of 
a local merchant whose arrieros were bound for Cerro de Pasco with 
a troop of cargo-animals. A " civilized " Indian, that is, one who 
wore shoes and spoke Spanish, called for me with a half-size horse, 
the crude native saddle covered with a pellon, the hairy saddle-rug all 
high-caste horsemen use in this region, and soon after noon we jogged 
away down a stony little river. The merchant had duly and honestly 
warned me that, being only pack-animals, his chuscos were gifted with 
no gentle pace. But he had not warned me that I was joining a way- 
freight. I drew on ahead in spite of myself, and when, barely eight 
miles from Huallanga, the shrieks and whistles of the drivers died out 
behind, I waited a half-hour in vain, then went back some distance to 
find them lassooing the animals one by one, piling their loads or pack- 
saddles in a hollow square, and turning them loose with their front 
feet crudely hobbled. There were nineteen animals, mostly in ballast, 
attended by four arrieros. Too lazy apparently to unsling their pots 
and cook supper, the patched and weather-faded quartet munched a 
bit of parched corn and a sheet of sun-dried beef, and sat all night 
drinking and wailing maudlin ballads. The " tent " stretched ovei 
the packs was so low that I had to lie down on the ground and rol' 
under it, and so thin that the rain dripped in upon me almost in 
streams. 

It was still black night when the water-soaked canvas was pulled oft 
me, and I found the arrieros already engaged in a riotous effort to 
round up the animals. This was no simple task, in spite of the hob- 
bles, and the morning was well advanced before the last of the troop 
had been lassooed and loaded. During the operation I suggested that 
we prepare at least a pot of tea, but Valenzuela, the chief arriero, dis- 
missed the matter with a grimace and a " neither wood nor grass will 

306 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

burn after the rain," and I could only choke my hunger with a rock- 
hard lump of bread and shiver under my poncho until I mounted, this 
time a mule, to spare the animal of the day before. 

We followed the river-gorge so long that it turned almost uncom- 
fortably warm. Then suddenly abandoning the highway to modern 
Huanuco and the roundabout, but warm and well-populated, route to 
Cerro de Pasco, the arrieros drove the animals pell-mell up a steep 
gorge between towering mountain walls, by what looked like a spillway 
from a stone-crusher. This was the very route I should have chosen, 
for while the longer one would have been more comfortable, this fol- 
lowed very closely the ancient Inca highway. Topping the horizon, we 
trotted on across an enormous, brown-yellow plain of scanty ichu vege- 
tation that stretched away to the hazy foot of what looked from this 
height like low hills. Here was just such a place as the Incas, requiring 
an unbroken outlook over the surrounding world and grazing land for 
their llamas, chose for their cities. I was not surprised, therefore, to 
find a long expanse of the paramo covered with hundreds of stone ruins, 
only the walls still standing, from one to eight feet high, in broken, 
fantastic disarray. This was " Huanuco el Viejo," which the Span- 
iards found an important city at the time of the Conquest, but which 
the less hardy half-breed descendants abandoned, as in so many cases, 
for a warmer valley, eighteen leagues to the east. History does not 
reach back to the origin of old Huanuco, the ruins of which still oc- 
cupy almost a square mile of the silent, utterly uninhabited plain. 
The road — a mere interweaving of faint paths across the Andean 
prairie — passed within five hundreds yards of the ruins, but the 
caravan pushed on without a halt, as if these monuments of their an- 
cestors were mere stone-heaps, unworthy a glance of attention. I 
turned and trotted away across the plain, bathed in the cold, glaring 
sunshine of the Andean plateau, toward the site. Valenzuela, after 
a shout of protest, stuck close on my heels, whether out of fear that 
I would decamp with the mule, or lay hands on some old Inca treas- 
ure, or from some superstition connected with the " Gentiles," I do not 
know. There was really little to be seen. Every one of the countless 
ruins of large and small buildings, arranged more or less in squares, 
were sections of cobble-stone walls, mere stone-heaps without sign of 
mortar, as crude as the chozas of shepherds, now fallen until, in many 
places, only their symmetrical arrangement suggested the hand of man. 
To this there was only one exception. Some three hundred yards 
from the rest of the ruins was a rectangular fortress of carefully cut 

307 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

and nicely fitted stone blocks, with suggestions of cement, now mere 
walls, some fifteen feet high, filled level full of earth on which the 
drear ichu grew as thickly as on the surrounding plain. Except in ex- 
tent, the ruins were not to be compared with those of Marca- 
Huamachuco, though the " castillo " closely resembled in construction 
and stone-fitting the single monument of Ingapirca in southern 
Ecuador. 

We trotted on after the pack-train, and rode for some hours over 
low ridges, each of which brought to view a new expanse of dreary, 
yellowish landscape. Occasionally an arriero broke forth in a mourn- 
ful song that rose and fell with the same monotony as the undulating 
paramo. Now and then, as a pack worked loose, one of the muleteers 
dismounted and, deftly slipping out of his poncho, threw it over the 
head of the animal and readjusted the load. To my surprise, quickly 
followed by my disgust, the train soon after noon swung into the cob- 
ble-fenced field of a low, cobble-stone hut, similar to, but far more 
miserable and tiny than those of the ancient city behind. Greeting the 
barefoot Indian woman who emerged on all fours from the hut, the 
arrieros began to round up and unload the animals. Though we had 
not made fifteen miles, we were to stop here for the night. I swallowed 
my wrath, reflecting that he who joins a freight-train must not expect 
express speed. 

It was too cold to sit, and I took to promenading weakly about the 
hillside. Down in a hollow beyond I came upon a family preparing 
their crop of potatoes after the ancient Inca fashion still common to 
the Andes. This chuno — chunu, in Quichua — is the chief vegetable 
of Andean market-places and the principal food of the Indians of the 
Sierra. The newly dug potatoes are spread out on the ground at a 
high altitude, preferably on the bank of a highland lake or stream, and 
left to freeze by night. They are small potatoes, for the Indian's 
mode of selection has been to plant only the smallest, eating or selling 
the larger, until the tubers indigenous to Peru have degenerated to the 
same low level as their horses and dogs. When the sun has thawed 
the potatoes, the Indians of the household tread out the juice with 
their bare feet, then spread them in the sun to dry. This produces the 
chuno negro, or black chuno, which in the time of the Incas was the 
only kind permitted the common people, and which to-day forms the 
chief product of the process. Those who prefer chuno bianco, the 
"twice frozen white chuno " which graced only the tables of the 
Incas and nobles, put the tubers inside a well of cobble-stones under 

308 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

the surface of a river or lake, and leave them from two to eight days, 
after which they are dried in the sun. The result is a food that will 
keep indefinitely, but which has very much the same taste as so much 
fried sand. The most common method of preparing these frozen pota- 
toes is to grind them in a stone mortar and use the powdered chuno 
to thicken soup. 

When the head of the Indian household arrived, he opened with 
Valenzuela a conversation in half-breed Quichua, of which I caught 
enough to learn that we were to drive a league west in the morning 
to wait a day for some species of cargo, stop to pick up another load 
a few leagues beyond, and so on indefinitely. I called the arriero 
aside and protested that, aside from the hardships and exposure of 
lying out on every mountain-side, I was steadily growing worse for 
lack of treatment. To my surprise he proposed that I ride on alone 
next day. As he would never have dreamed of making such a pro- 
posal to a Peruvian stranger, it spoke well of the opinion he had gath- 
ered of Americans from contact with them in the mining town to- 
ward which we were headed. A bed of several horse-blankets was 
spread for me beneath the flap of the canvas covering our packs, out 
under the shivering stars that stood forth in the luminous highland sky 
with the unnatural luster of electric bulbs. During the later hours of 
the night, when I rolled out into the cold, still air, a brilliant full moon 
was flooding with almost the light of noonday the rolling mountainous 
world about us as far as the eye could reach. 

I knew only too well that a matter settled the night before would 
have to be argued out anew in the morning. Dawn crept up over the 
eaves of the east, and the god of the Incas flung his horizontal rays 
across the empty plateau, but Valenzuela, assuming the custdhjary air 
in such cases, that we had neither of us meant what we had said the 
evening before, made no move to prepare for my departure. When 
I reminded him of his promise, he announced that he would, of course, 
keep it, if I really, seriously desired it. Only, it would be utterly im- 
possible for a man unacquainted with the route to find his way across 
the often unmarked punas and pampas ahead. Then, too, it was in- 
fested with bands of robbers who at times attacked whole pack-trains, 
to say nothing of one lone, helpless gringo. If only I would wait until 
to-morrow, he and I would ride on alone at breakneck speed, and 
make up for all the delay. I had long since learned the close resem- 
blance of the South American mafiana to a greased pig; moreover, I 
had no desire to ride at breakneck speed. He muttered under his 

309 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

breath at this gringo obstinacy, and ordered the youngest arriero to 
saddle a horse and accompany me. The latter refused. Valenzuela 
shrugged his shoulders with a gesture that meant, " You see it is out 
of the question." But the experienced Andean traveler can always 
win his point, if he insists long and hard enough. The chief arriero 
gave up at last and sent a man to lassoo and saddle, not the " stout 
mule " he had promised the evening before, but one of the saddest 
imitations of the genus horse in camp ; and late in the morning I rode 
down through the chuno-producing gully and away over the brown 
and sterile world spread broad and high before me. 

The arriero's first prophecy came quickly true. I lost the road. A 
stretch of what was evidently the old Inca highway, broad and grass- 
grown and lined by two rows of stones, pushed straight on over all 
obstacles in what seemed to be the right direction, but it did not fit 
the descriptions that had been given me. The well-marked trail I 
followed led me down into two gaping hamlets that had not been men- 
tioned, and doubled the miles to Baiios, somnolent as an Italian village 
at summer noonday, down in the throat of a gorge. The frowsy 
chusco already gave signs of not being able to endure the journey. 
All I demanded was a reasonable walking pace, yet it cost me far 
more labor than to have made the trip afoot to keep the animal mov- 
ing a scant two miles an hour. It was evident that, for all my incessant 
labor, we should not reach before nightfall the hacienda we were 
seeking, and when it came on to rain and hail in a cold, bleak bowl of 
mountains, I turned toward a collection of huts that stood out dimly 
as an animal of protective coloring on the upper edge of the saucer- 
shaped hollow. 

The Indian men, patronizing and arrogant in their clumsy way, as 
usual in such situations, offered me the customary six-inch block of 
wood on which to squat under the eaves of the " corredor." I took 
weakly to promenading the twenty-four miles in the saddle out of my 
legs, and furtively inspected the six huts that made up the collection. 
All were earth-floored dens, roofed with ichu, against several of which 
immense quantities of dried cow-dung were stacked like cord-wood. 
The women squatting over the fire in the center of one of the huts 
handled fuel and food at one and the same time. Though they were 
barefoot and scantily clad, the men wore heavy, home-knit wool stock- 
ings to their knees, and crude moccasins of a scrip of hairy cowhide, 
drawn together over the foot with a " puckering string " of rawhide. 
The males spoke considerable Spanish, but the women knew, or pre- 

310 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

tended to know, only Quichua. There were attached to the place at 
least a score of dogs, who set up a head-splitting chorus as often as I 
stirred, and at few-minute intervals even without that provocation. 
Across the shallow hollow the long line of snow-clad peaks that had 
grown up along the entire eastern horizon during the day stood forth 
in bold and impressive majesty in the light of evening, a light that 
seemed strained through purple-tinted crystals. 

When the mountain cold settled down like an icy sheet, I asked where 
I might sleep. 

" Why, there in the corredor, to be sure," mumbled the Indian. 

" We gente blanca have not the indifference to cold of los naturales," 
I replied. 

" Well, then, here in the kitchen," he grumbled. 

" How about that casita ?"I asked, pointing to a pampa-grass lean-to 
against the largest hut. 

" That is where the family sleeps." 

" And that? " I persisted, indicating a structure of beehive or beaver- 
house shape, built entirely of ichu and with a rounded door not three 
feet high, that stood forth on a knoll behind the others. 

But that, it seemed, was where the watchman slept — though what 
he watched was not apparent. After a long conference in Quichua, 
however, this was assigned me with sullen grace; a boy was sent 
to drag out the " watchman's " bed of sheepskins, and I struggled 
up to the shelter with saddle, pack, and equipment, and crawled inside 
on hands and knees. The choza was constructed on the same plan 
as the wigwams of the American " red men," — a pole frame set up 
cone-shaped and covered with mountain grass, through which the bit- 
ter wind that swept across this sterile upland cut as a knife through 
cheese-cloth, and so low that even in the center I could barely stand 
upright on my knees. The chusco had been turned over to a boy 
who was to watch it all night for a week's wage. It was not that I 
took much stock in the Indian's assertion that there was horse-steal- 
ing in these parts ; but I hoped by this arrangement to forestall any ras- 
cality he might himself set afoot. The " watching," however, was evi- 
dently by some species of aboriginal telepathy; for not only was no 
sign of a guardian to be seen as often as I crawled out into that in- 
terminable night, but when morning came the head of the household 
greeted me with: 

" El chusco se ha perdido — the animal has lost itself." 

" Lost ! " I cried. 

3ii 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

" Si, senor, bfit it will be found again. The boy has already been 
sent to search for it." 

How even my long-experienced instinct for guessing aright among 
a hundred splendid chances to go astray saved me from getting hope- 
lessly lost during that day, I have never been able to fathom. Across 
the utterly uninhabited and almost untraveled mountain-top the trail 
was at best faintly marked, and finally, beyond the cold, blue lake of 
Lauracocha, reputed the real source of the Amazon, it disappeared alto- 
gether. For hours I prodded my wretched imitation of a horse for- 
ward by compass over hill and dale, and by some stroke of luck fell 
upon the trail again beyond. Soon the pampa gave way to green and 
tremulous sod, and a swamp in which I all but mired the animal beyond 
recovery. Nor did the route hold to the same direction, but frequently 
sidestepped unexpectedly for no apparent reason, and it was only by the 
general lay of the hills and the instinct of long practice that I picked it 
up again. Once it split evenly, and the branch I chose led far up the 
face of a thousand-foot cliff, the path hewn in the sheer wall growing 
ever narrower, until the animal thumped my knee against the stone 
precipice and all but pitched us headlong into the appalling ravine 
below. To dismount was no simple task, and had the horse been a 
foot longer I should not have succeeded in turning him around and 
leading the way back to the fork. On the other side of the peak was 
a great natural stone stairway, down which the animal slipped and 
dropped with a painful succession of jolts. The gorge narrowed and 
deepened ; then suddenly, close at hand on the steep flank of the moun- 
tain, appeared the first llamas I had seen in Peru, a whole flock of 
them. From then on they were so frequent that within the next half- 
hour I had seen far more llamas than in all the rest of my life. A new 
costume for men, at first sight ludicrous, came into evidence almost at 
the same time. Instead of trousers they wore very roomy, dark-col- 
ored breeches, cut off exactly at the knee, so that the first glimpse of 
their wearers at a distance was little short of startling, suggesting for 
a moment the astounding incongruity of an Indian woman sporting 
the skirt of a ballet-dancer. Below these garments they wore the long, 
knitted wool stockings, gray or black, and the hairy cowhide moc- 
casins that had first appeared a few days before, and as they passed 
me they snatched off their heavy, brown felt hats with some mum- 
bled greeting in Quichua. 

While enjoying a racking fever in the comparatively comfortable 
home of the gobernador of Yanahuanca, I learned that there were two 

312 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

ways of reaching Cerro de Pasco. One was to ride nine bitter-cold 
leagues across a trackless puna, on which a lone gringo was sure to get 
lost and die of exposure ;' the other was to travel about half that dis- 
tance by a well-marked road to Goyllarisquisca, where los americanos 
have their coal mines and whence there ran a daily train. I could not 
believe that fate would be so crude a practical joker as to let a man 
who had found his way clear from Bogota go astray on the last day 
of his journey, but I could easily conceive of the wreck of a horse 
wilting between my leaden legs somewhere out on the unmarked 
pampa; moreover, the sight of a railroad would be a comparatively 
new experience. I decided on the shorter route. 

It necessitated the gobernador calling me at two in the morning, be- 
fore a raging fever had entirely burned itself out. An Indian in 
flowing breeches, leading a " horse " that was to bring back some ar- 
rival by train, and another astride a pitifully small pony, led the way 
out into the luminous star-lit night. A good road tacked gradually 
upward through a sleeping village, hanging like some prehensile crea- 
ture on the swift hillside, where the dogs sang us a rousing chorus, 
and lifted us in some three hours to the razor-backed summit of a 
ridge, down the further slope of which sprawled headlong a still larger 
town, fantastic of profile in the morning starlight. We labyrinthed 
through it, meeting scores of panty-clad and moccasined Indians and 
barefoot women and girls toiling marketward under atrocious bur- 
dens ; for the day was Sunday. Below the town we came out on a 
road paralleling a stupendous gorge ; and across it, so high above that I 
could scarcely believe it possible a cluster of electric lights, suspended 
in the night between earth and heaven, mingled with the stars and half 
blotted out at intervals by the smoke of American industry, marked 
Goyllarisquisca, a city of the sky, to see which we must crane our 
necks like countrymen at the foot of man's mightiest monument. 
The stars went out one by one, like gas-jets turned off by hurrying 
street-lighters ; the luminous night turned to colorless opaque dawn, in 
which the jagged Sierra stood out flat and featureless as if cut out of 
cardboard. We went down and ever down into an unconscionable 
gorge, to cross — such is the ghastly futility of Latin- America — an 
insignificant stream; then quickly began to climb again. There was a 
path straight up the mountain-side to Goyllarisquisca, a path which a 
man unsusceptible to dizziness, and capable of climbing a steep stair- 
way of a hundred thousand steps without guard-rails or a landing on 
which to pause for breath, might cover in a half-hour. Instead, we 

313 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

wound corkscrew-wise around the entire mountain, through another 
town, fantastic in its perpendicular setting as the last, yet reduced in 
the disillusioning light of day to its drab, mud-built reality; and un- 
covering others pitched at queer places on unattainable noses and 
gouged-out hollows of the range in which the shadows still lurked like 
skulking bandits. The mountains beyond were garbed from head to 
foot in white robes, and in the valleys lay seas of mist from which 
emerged crags and peaks like uninhabited, rocky islands. Less beau- 
tiful, perhaps, in its aspect than the more colorful Alps, the scene 
vastly outdid these in its rugged, masculine grandeur. Little by little 
we fell in with an almost unbroken procession of Indians; here and 
there one clad in exotic overalls whispered the approach of American 
influence, and at length our breathless animals staggered over the last 
ridge into the village of the tongue-loosening name. 

Before me lay a small Pittsburgh, not so small at that, with great 
cranes swinging across the gorges, unsentimental stone buildings roar- 
ing and matter-of-fact chimneys belching forth the sooty smoke of in- 
dustry. Long rows of decent living-quarters were interspersed with 
longer ones of box and flat cars, and sprawling about the higher levels 
were native shacks so tinged with the foreign influence that even a 
stove-pipe protruded here and there from their roofs of wavy sheet- 
iron. Across the scene floated the sweet music of a deep-voiced 
American train whistle, and on every hand was the evidence of dili- 
gence, masculine toil, and effective doing that quickened my northern 
pulse like a deep draft of wine. It was like coming back to my native 
world after a long absence. Scores of half-forgotten things I had 
never before seen in South America surged up about me, and upon me 
came drowsy contentment that my struggles were behind me and that I 
had already virtually set foot in the central plaza of Lima. 

I slipped clumsily off the miserable chusco and turned him over, 
trappings and all, to the Indian who was to deliver him to Valen- 
zuela when he passed through Yanahuanca. My legs obeyed me sul- 
lenly, as if weighted with ball and chain, and my physical condition 
gave to my movements a hesitating, deliberate dignity. At the station 
was a restaurant run by a Chinaman with Peruvian assistance, where 
the American influence by no means ceased at bacon and eggs, but 
had reached the height of butter and sliced bread, and rosy bottles of 
catsup ! In a corner of the room a coal-stove blazed merrily, the first 
artificial heat I had felt in a long two years. I wandered out upon the 
platform. At the far end stood a man fondling a dog, a real dog, not 

3H 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

an Andean cur, and as I approached he protested affectionately and in- 
effectually : 

" Now you get down ; you 're dirtying my pants." 

There was no mistaking that vocabulary, even if the strangely nasal 
accent that struck my unaccustomed ear rudely had not sufficed to be- 
tray the speaker's nationality. Peruvians do not fondle dogs; nor do 
they refer to their nether garments in that abrupt and familiar fashion. 
I was soon seated in a comfortable office-chair, a stack of New York 
papers beside me. But I gave up in dispair explaining how I had 
come to Goyll — well, pronounce it yourself — without having ever 
been either in Lima or " the Cerro " ; and I fancy I had convinced my 
host of nothing, except that I was a clumsy and unconscionable liar, 
before the giant Baldwin rolled in, dragging behind it a half-dozen 
full-sized American freight-cars, as if some branch of the railways of 
my own land had pierced this lofty nook of the Andes. 

The official business of the line is to transport coal to the mines at 
Cerro de Pasco, and passengers are accepted only on suffrance. The 
" first-class " coach was the familiar old American caboose, with a line 
of leather cushions along the walls and a coal stove in the center. It 
was empty when I entered, but had I not almost forgotten the ways of 
Latin-American travelers, I should not have been so surprised when 
it at length filled to overflowing with noisy, over-dressed native 
women, a few men of the white-collar class, drummers for the most 
part, hideous with rings, and every species of bundle and cumbersome 
baggage. Then two robust American trainmen, genuine as if they had 
that moment been picked off the top of a transcontinental freight-car, 
stamped in, climbed into their cupola, and we were off. 

It was the reaction, no doubt, from the straining months behind me 
that brought on a paludismo that set me shaking even under my poncho. 
But the unaccustomed artificial heat all but choked me, and when I 
had accepted an orange, and gravely refused the whiskey, brandy, and 
black coffee my sympathetic fellow-passengers would have forced upon 
me as sure cures, I climbed into the cupola. The landscape would not 
have been joyful under the best of conditions. A bare mountain- top, 
faintly rolling, its frosty soil cherishing no vegetation except the dreary 
yellow-brown ichu of the uplands, stretched monotonously away on 
every hand, its surface flooded with the brilliant, thin sunshine of 
Andean plateaux and mottled here and there with fleecy cloud shadows. 
Now and then a flock of llamas lifted their absurd heads to gaze 
after us as we sped past. Once or twice we stopped at a wind- 

315 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

threshed mud-town, standing out pitifully unsheltered on the treeless 
waste, halted an hour at grimy, smoke-belching La Fundicion with its 
smelters, and drew up at dusk in bare and dreary Cerro de Pasco. It 
was June 22, three months from the Peruvian frontier and 2269 miles 
from Bogota, of which I had covered 243 on horseback and twenty-five 
by rail. 

On the train I had been the storm-center of a heated difference of 
opinion. The Peruvian passengers contended that I should descend 
by the morning express to Lima, where I woul*d quickly recover under 
the care of famous physicians of the capital; the train-crew that I 
should enter the hospital of the American mining company on " the 
Hill." There could be no debate between entrusting myself again to 
the careless inefficiency of native practitioners, and the happy oppor- 
tunity of entering an institution conducted by men of my own race. 
When I had found a boy to carry my baggage, I set out with high 
hopes, if slow steps, for the American hospital. 

It was an imposing, one-story building, covering a space equal to a 
city block and forming a hollow square around an extensive cement- 
floored patio, on the far edge of the drear and colorless American min- 
ing town, well removed from its smoke and swirling dust and disturb- 
ing noises. My welcome was not, to be sure, exactly what a morbid 
imagination had led me to picture, but that was no doubt due to the 
fact that both doctors were at the moment absent. The head-nurse 
overcame in time her inclination to refuse me admittance, and sent an 
Indian boy, closely related in personal habits to the occupants of moun- 
tain-top chozas, to show me into a ward. In appearance it was all 
that a hospital ward should be, its ten imported cots all unoccupied. 
The boy jerked his head sidewise toward a chair and disappeared. 
Two empty hours dragged funereally by. Then another Indian youth, 
startlingly like a personification of squalor and uncleanliness in a 
masque gotten up by some stern disciple of the Zola school of realism, 
burst in upon my feverish dreams, and before I could raise a hand in 
protest thrust a thermometer into my mouth. Evidently it was his 
assigned duty to take the temperature of anyone caught on the premises. 
Had I come into the ward to recane the chairs, no doubt he would have 
forced a thermometer down my throat, like some automatic machine 
worked by springs, removed and shaken it, wiped it on the seat of his 
trousers, and pattered away on his bare feet. 

Long after dark the fresh and rosy assistant-doctor dashed into the 
room. But he had no time to give attention to my symptoms and ex- 

316 







''■:"\^'.^- 



& 



rm» 






* 



The fortress of the former Inca city of Huanaco el Viejo, far up on the now uninhabited 
pampa above the sheltering valley in which cowers the modern city of the same name 




A typical residence of the Indians of the high Paramos, built of heaped-up stones and brown 

»c/jM-grass; so low one cannot stand upright in it. Here the family sleeps on the uneven 

earth floor, or on a hairy cowhide, with their yellow curs, guinea-pigs, and other 

domestic animals. Cooking is done outside over a fire of ichtt or dung 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

planations, for dinner was about to be served, and ordering me to get 
into a bed, he dashed for the door again. I protested that I had 
brought with me the unpleasant evidence of long Andean travel, and 
he jerked a thumb over his shoulder with a parting mumble of "bath- 
room." There was one, even as he had indicated, with all modern 
appliances; but like most new-fangled inventions transplanted to the 
Andes, it did not " function." Another example of the Peruvian ab- 
horrence of soap was ordered to bring a half-dozen pails of hot water, 
which in his haste to be done with the task he translated into the 
Castilian for luke-warm; and I crawled at last into one of the cots. 
Soon afterward the Indian boy came to climb into another, in the 
same identical rags he wore by day. The dinner was evidently a pro- 
longed and engaging function, for neither the doctor nor any other 
sign of human interest appeared again during a night in which 1 
tossed incessantly with fever, while the ward blazed with electric 
lights and the ineffectual steam-pipes thumped and pounded like an 
adjacent boiler-factory. 

I am happy to be able to say that neither the two physicians, whom 
we will disguise under the pseudonyms of Dr. F and Dr. D, nor the 
head-nurse, of the American hospital were my fellow-countrymen; 
they came from further north. Materially an establishment to boast 
of, its condition in anything touched by the personal equation was in- 
credible. Homeopathic in creed, it put its trust in pills, and left the 
rest to eight immature Indians, as devoid of human instincts as of 
supervision. In a second cheerless, bare ward adjoining the one I 
occupied were a score of injured or ailing Indian workmen; yet no 
precaution whatever was taken to keep infection from passing from 
one room to the other. A single thermometer served all alike. Twice 
a day the automatic youth of the bare feet went the rounds in quest 
of temperatures, carrying a bottle of antiseptic so low in stock that it 
did not reach a third as far up the instrument as did the lips of patients ; 
and too indolent to go to the dispensary for cotton, he wiped it after 
each use on whatever came within reach, — his sleeve, his trousers, or 
the noisome rag each servant carried over a shoulder in guise of 
napkin. If the ten cots had been full, instead Of the four that repre- 
sented the maximum of occupancy during my stay, I do not know what 
habits we might have adopted; for there were only three cups, three 
tablespoons, and one teaspoon attached to the ward. The printed 
rules announced that meal-hours were 7 ; 10 ; and 5 130. In practice 
they averaged : Breakfast, 8 40 to 9, Dinner, 1 to 1 130, and Supper, 

317 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

about 8. The same stern placard called attention to the fact that 
visitors were admitted only on Sunday afternoons. Yet scarcely a 
night passed without a mob of Indians or cholos, male and female, 
friends of the internes or of some inmate, stamping into the ward as 
soon as darkness had settled down, and often keeping up an uproar 
until long after midnight. Then it was the unexplainable custom, on 
those days set for that ceremony, to drag out a fire-hose at four in 
the morning and " wash down " the ward like the deck of a ship, 
flooding the floor an inch or more deep in icy highland water, through 
which patients put to that necessity might wade to and from their cots. 
In the sumptuous quarters of physicians and nurses, occupying all 
the front half of the building, the formal repasts were provided with 
every obtainable delicacy, and enlivened with music and gaiety. In 
the wards the ostensibly well-regulated diet monotonously reduced it- 
self in practice to the leathery " green " beefsteaks of the Andes and 
two or three other articles sanctioned by prehistoric Andean costumbre. 
The Latin-American racial lack of initiative is nowhere more in evi- 
dence than in the kitchen. If doctor or nurse prescribed some special 
dish for a patient, there came back in answer — after authority had dis- 
appeared from the scene — that threadbare Peruvian prevarication, 
" No hay " ; which meant that the cook was giving vent to his tempera- 
mental grouchiness, was too lazy to set another pot on the fire, or was 
keeping the delicacy for himself or some " compadre." The youthful 
assistant-physician, trained in the far north, was supremely ignorant of 
tropical diseases, and, what was worse, had no inclination to add to his 
professional knowledge. His interests were confined to the contents 
of a row of unhomeopathic bottles and the manipulation of fifty-two 
small cardboards at the club-rooms a few blocks away, where he might 
be found — though not easily called — at almost any hour, ensconced 
in one of the leather-upholstered lounges before the blazing fire-place. 
The " gringa " head-nurse chose to do duty by day, and arising every 
forenoon, came in to smile at each of us about ten, and sometimes 
again in the early afternoon, before it was time to dress for her daily 
" bridge " and tea. In a loquacious moment she confided to me that she 
" just loved " to travel and, having always longed to see " strange for- 
eign countries like Peru," had been delighted to get an appointment to 
spend a year or two in it. The assistant-nurse was the most disturb- 
ingly beautiful Peruvian it had so far been my fortune to set eyes upon, 
— and she took the customary advantage of that fact by making no 
effort to be anything else. Being a subordinate, she was obliged to take 

3i8 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

the night-shift; but being also a Peruvian, she did not often permit 
that misfortune to break her night's rest. 

Five days I had studied its ceiling when the morning brought Dr. 
F, physician in chief, who had been absent on a round of the com- 
pany's hospitals, hurrying into the ward. He was a far more suc- 
cessful practitioner than his youthful assistant — in that he made the 
daily round in about five minutes less than the ten which Dr. D 
squandered. Two or three mornings later he paused at my cot to 
grumble querulously: 

" It 's funny you don't get better. It must be you are not 

making up your mind to. Mental attitude, you know. As soon as 
you had that purge, these pills should have taken hold at once." 

" That what ? " I murmured. 

" Oh, don't be stupid ! The castor-oil Dr. D gave you a day after 
you turned up here ; the basis of our system of treatment." 

" I have had only pills." 

" Nonsense ! Dr. D, what day did this man have his purge ? " 

" I prescribed it last Monday," yawned the assistant. 

" Of course. Now . . ." 

" But I assure you I have yet to know the taste of castor-oil." 

" Who gave him the oil ? " the doctor flung over a shoulder. 

" Sehorita ," replied the subordinate, naming the Peruvian 

nurse. 

She chanced to pass the door in fetching street-garb a moment later, 
and was called in to confirm the statement. 

" Ah, es verdad ! " she lisped, in her beautiful nonchalance, " Me 
olvide — I forgot," and with a bewitching smile at the physicians she 
hurried away to her daytime engagements. 

Determined not to celebrate my nation's birthday as I had my own, 
I forced my leaden legs to carry me on an afternoon stroll through the 
famous mining town. The steel-blue skies of Cerro de Pasco, three 
miles aloft and boasting itself the highest city in the world, are clear 
beyond any description in mere words. Not once during my sojourn 
there was the penetrating brilliancy flecked by the slightest whiff of 
cloud. The sun blazed down with an intensity that burned the cheeks 
as at the open mouth of a puddling-f urnace ; yet even at blinding 
noon-time the cold had a power of penetration unknown to a northern 
mid-winter day on which the mercury falls far lower. Those who as- 
cend " the Hill " from Lima complain of a leaden inertia and pains 
varying in intensity and duration, brought on by an altitude that is 

319 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

fatal to weak hearts and to victims of pneumonia. Inured to the 
heights and scantiness of air almost unbrokenly from far-off Bogota, I 
had no consciousness of any such effects. 

Nearly a mile from the hospital, the American town, of stone build- 
ings and even less attractive structures, such as the " Tin Can," an 
ugly, red, sheet-iron barracks that houses the garden variety of gringo 
employees, scattered among bare, protruding rocks of a landscape 
dreary beyond conception, gives way to the old familiar Peruvian 
huts and hovels. These, in turn, develop further on into two-story 
dwellings above and shops below, often quaint and striking in archi- 
tecture. If any city of Peru may be called " unique " in appearance, 
it is " el Cerro." Even in the center of the town, roofs of ancient, 
weather- faded straw alternate with those of wavy sheet-iron; instead 
of the monotonously square blocks of other Andean cities, its older 
section is a tangle of narrow streets and misshapen buildings, like a 
change from our Middle West to Boston. Perched on the summit of 
the world, with scarcely a knoll overtopping it, or the suggestion of a 
shrub to shelter it, " the Cerro " is the unhampered playground of icy 
mountain winds laden with coal-dust, stinging sand, and the soot and 
smoke and powdered ore from its mines. Bronzed foreigners and 
miners in leather leggings and hob-nailed boots, squeaking through the 
streets afoot, or astride Texas-saddled mules, lend the place an air of 
modernity, for all its swarms of bovine-mannered Indians. In con- 
trast, droves of llamas, with gaily colored ribbons in their ears, slip 
past in noiseless dignity, or stand in patient groups before a chicheria, 
awaiting their drivers. The hardware and similar trades offer stocks 
unknown to those sections of the Andes where the imports depend on 
transportation " en lomo de mula." Even the pulperias are well-sup- 
plied with foodstuffs, testifying to the American influence. From a 
dust-swirling knoll rising a bit above the rest the eye is gladdened by 
the glimpse of a cold-blue lake of considerable size, strangely beauti- 
ful in its drear and dismal setting. From this point of vantage, too, 
the stranger becomes aware that " el Cerro " is much more of a city 
than he suspected, filling the great lap of a repulsive, barren range, and 
stretching away in several directions under belching smoke-stacks. 

Twelve days I had tarried in Cerro de Pasco, and had advanced from 
my original ailment to one distinctly more serious, when I concluded to 
descend to Lima while I still had strength to do so. The company 
physician-in-chief collected a fee that more than doubled my expendi- 
tures since leaving Quito, and spared himself the annoyance of penning 

320 




The arrieros with whom I left Huallanga, and the family inhabiting the hut shown in the 

preceding picture 




The immaculate staff of the Cerro de Pasco hospital 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

a receipt, or of any other formality beyond that of dropping the hand- 
ful of gold sovereigns into his pocket on his breathless morning round. 
The night sky was turning slightly more transparent along the cold 
eastern horizon when I tottered out of the hospitable Cerro de Pasco 
hospital on my way to the station. The second-class car was a stove- 
less ice-box, densely packed with Indians and all the bath-fearing ab- 
original is accustomed to carry with him. A glance at it sufficed to 
dissipate my resolution to save a sovereign from the wreck of my for- 
tune. The first-class coach was an American car scantily filled with 
white-collar Peruvians and weather-, experience-, and liquor-marked 
Americans under forty, " husky " in build and untrammelled in man- 
ners. The wintry July dawn climbed up over the far edge of the 
bleak, treeless world, and at Smelter, cheerless beyond words in the 
new-born daylight, we were joined by more cold-faced Americans, 
wrapped, as were also many of the natives, in huge neck-roll sweaters. 
Dressed even in all the clothing I possessed, I kept my poncho close 
about me, for the coal-stove in the front end of the car was no match 
for the frigidity of the vast ichu-brown pampa de Junin across which 
we were soon speeding. Only by frequently scratching a peep-hole in 
the frosted window could I gaze out upon the drear yellow world, with 
its snow peaks rising slightly above it in the distance and its great 
flocks of cold-impervious llamas feeding along the way between ice- 
coated streams and pools. Off in both directions stood scattered, stone 
huts with pampa-grass roofs, before which barefoot (brr!) Indian 
women stood or squatted, and scantily clad children gazed after the 
train with the stolidity and indifference to the bitter cold of the adobe 
images they somehow suggested. Here was the scene of the great 
battle of Junin in which the soldiers of Bolivar defeated the Spanish 
host ; but it is not likely that either pursued or pursuers dripped with 
perspiration. A dreary walk, indeed, this would have been across the 
icy, endless, yellow pampa. 

A brilliant sun popped up instantly in a faultless sky, like some 
jack-in-the-box suddenly released; but though it flooded all the visible 
world with golden light, it brought slight warmth. Beside each seat of 
our car was an electric button, and beneath it a list of possibilities, in 
English and Spanish. One had only to press it and presto! a big 
black negro — no, my memories of other days deceive me; no big 
black negro would get this high in the world, unless he were dragged 
there by main force — a little, dapper, noiseless, inscrutable, white- 
jacketed Chinaman slipped down upon one and lent an attentive, yet 

321 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

haughty ear into which one whispered the desires of the inner man, 
tempered by a subconscious regard for one's purse; calling modestly 
for toast and coffee, if one were a mere American vagabond who had 
recently fallen among thiev — beg pardon, physicians; or for the 
" whole damn works," which meant the same coffee and toast plus a 
plate of bacon and eggs, if one were an American miner homeward 
bound, to whom money is as water to the man whose pocket holdeth a 
quart bottle of concentrated joyfulness. Across the aisle were two 
such, from whom sounded now and then some pleasant anticipation 
of homecoming: 

" An' when I get back to Pittsburgh I 'm goin' into the House 

bar and tell Joe to mix me a real, honest-to-God gin-ricky. An' when 
he says 'Where t'ell you been these two years, Hank?' I '11 jus' say 
' Diggin' coal down in Goyllaris — hie — quisca, Joe,' an' he '11 call the 
bouncer to throw me out." 

A big, blue lake, Chinchaycocha, on the distant right drew the eyes 
toward it; then came a brief halt at the town of Junin, an extensive 
collection of cobble-stone huts and fences, with a two-tower church in 
their midst and steam rising on the wintry air from the nostrils of 
every living being. Then at last, after an extended, wandering search, 
the train found the rocky bed of a small river, and wound and squirmed 
with it through half-hidden openings in the hills until a long-drawn 
masculine whistle caused us to scratch a new peep-hole in the frosted 
window, to find Oroya rising up to meet us. 

Here the American train and roadbed abandoned us to the tender 
mercies of the Ferrocarril Central, theoretically under English man- 
agement, but in practice dismally Latin-American from cow-catcher 
to trailing draw-bar. Packed into the far corner of a seat upholstered 
only in name, I had frozen from toes to the bottom of my poncho for 
two mortal hours before the Peruvian engineer came to an under- 
standing with the Peruvian conductor and station-master, and dragged 
us slowly out of town. From a spot on the earth — and nothing 
more — called Ticlio, summit of the line, we began the long coast 
down to the Pacific, through all the customary 65 tunnels, 67 bridges 
and 16 switchbacks, where for the brakes to lose control would have 
been to land us in Hades instead of Lima. Hour after hour the 
arid, savage scenery slid upward. Here the train glided serenely 
along on the bottomless edge of things ; now and again we came out di- 
rectly above, a thousand feet above, a dusty, rock-scattered town, with 
rows of stones laid on the sheet-iron roofs to keep them from es- 

322 



THE ROOF OF PERU 

caping such dreary surroundings, and zigzagged 'an hour, often on six 
tracks one above the other, down to it, only to continue the descent 
as swiftly beyond. A score of places recalled the story of the young 
graduate engineer who protested to the American whose name is 
forever linked with this engineering feat, " Why, Meiggs, we can't 
run a railroad along there in that sliding shale ! " " Can't, eh ? " the 
anecdote continues, " Well, young man, that 's just where she 's got to 
go, and if you can't find room for her on the ground, we '11 hang her 
from balloons." 

Bit by bit the Andes began to take on slight touches of green. The 
Rimac, chattering downward toward the sea, gave us more and more 
elbow-room, the well-dressed town of Chosica flashed past us like an 
oasis of civilization, and we sped in truly metropolitan fashion on 
down the darkening valley, surrounded by whole mountains of broken 
rock, tufts of cactus and a few hardy willows drinking their life from 
the widening stream, on toward the glowing sunset and into the black 
night. Electric lights, real lights in their full candle-power, began to 
dot the darkness, then flashed past us, throwing their insolent glare 
into our dust-veiled faces ; the roar of a real city, with clanging street- 
cars and rumbling wagons rose about us; a long station-platform 
crowded with an urban throng came to a halt beside us, and I de- 
scended in the thickness of the summer night in the City of Kings, 
three miles below where I had stepped forth that morning into the 
wintry dawn. 



323 



CHAPTER XIII 

ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL 

IT is due, I suppose, to some error in my make-up that my interest 
in any given corner of the earth fades in proportion as it ap- 
proaches modern civilization and easy accessibility. To your 
incurable vagabond may come a momentary thrill, if not of pleasure, 
at least of contentment, with the feel of city pavements once more 
under his feet after long hand to hand combat with the wilderness, 
and the knowledge that to go a journey he has only to signal an elec- 
tric street-car on the nearest corner. But the attraction quickly palls. 
Visions of the winding trail soon begin again to torture him with 
their solicitations, the placid ways of urban man take on a drab and 
colorless artificiality, and once more the realization comes that to 
him life offers genuine satisfaction only when he is struggling on- 
ward toward some distant and possibly unattainable goal. 

Such a place is Lima. The former capital of Spanish America 
has, to be sure, its points of interest; old colonial palaces where the 
shades of cloaked viceroys seem still to linger, cloistered walls in- 
closing the tonsured and cowled atmosphere of the Middle Ages, nar- 
row streets with long vistas of overhanging Moorish balconies wherein 
still lurks the charm of other days. But these things are all but 
buried under the stereotyped conveniences and commonplace manners 
of the modern world. Upon the romance and air of antiquity of a 
Spanish city of long ago, transplanted to this sandy coast, has in- 
truded the aggressive urge of commerce ; from between the carved 
mahogany bars of quaint miradores peers the face of trade; in and 
out of massive old wooden street-doors studded with brass come bales 
of merchandise, often stacked high in the beautiful patios and se- 
cluded retreats of former generations. Here, for the first time in 
South America, were rumors of strikes and complaints of the " serv- 
ant problem." Workmen and domestics, advanced already to a scale 
of wages about half that of our own land, were coming more and 
more to a knowledge of their worth and power, their striving un- 
fortunately taking that ultra-modern form of careless workmanship 

324 



ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL 

and insolence. Here, for the first time, the militant " cost of living " 
weighed down on the mass of mankind like a leaden blanket. Lima's 
thousand and one restaurants — why do none of them seek a virgin 
field in the highlands ? — serve their clients with the mechanical im- 
personality of world capitals. Like the population, these show that 
absence of a " middle class " characteristic of Latin-American so- 
ciety, the marked contrast of the great bulk of sandaled poor rubbing 
shoulders with faultless Parisian attire; either they are repulsive 
workingmen's " dumps," or outwardly regal in manner and inwardly of 
purse-flattening properties, where nothing national and unique is to be 
found, unless it be some rare local delicacy, such as asado de chivito, — 
roast leg of young goat. Whatever exclusive and characteristic re- 
mains on the surface is grouped in and about the great covered mar- 
ket-place, where long rows of strange indigenous and familiar foreign 
wares stretch in many-hued and quaint juxtaposition, or hovers about 
a few surviving customs of bygone days, such as the milkman — who 
is more often a woman — making his morning round astride horse 
or mule, with his cans hanging like saddle-bags from between his legs. 
He who comes down upon them from above will find the people of 
the coast more vivacious than those of the chilly upper Andes, where 
the perennial gauntness of nature inclines to perpetual gloom. The 
limefio has been likened to the Andalusian in his fondness for dress, 
variety, and dissipation, in his gaiety and quickness of wit, his open 
frankness and tendency to extravagance. Certainly his speech has 
the lisp of Andalusia — " Do' copita' de pi'co, sefiore' " — and his 
Castilian has not the purity of that of Bogota. Yet his gaiety is only 
comparative. There is an innate gloominess and passive pessimism 
everywhere in South American society that cannot but strike the 
visitor who comes direct from more favored lands. The morose Indian 
of the uplands forms a scarcely noticeable part of the population of 
Lima. On those rare occasions when he comes down, or more often is 
brought as a conscript to serve his time as soldier in the capital, he 
often falls quick victim to the white plague, which finds easy breed- 
ing-place in the disused cells of his overdeveloped lungs, built for the 
scant, thin air of the Sierra. The cholo or mestizo, commonly of a 
lesser percentage of aboriginal than of Spanish blood, makes up the 
bulk of the population. Then there is the sambo, bred of the inter- 
mingling of the Indian and negro, a robust, stubborn, and revengeful 
fellow. Merchants from all the varying nationalities of Europe keep 
shop side by side, with an intermingling of " Turks " and even more 

325 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

distant races, and American engineers stride through the streets at 
all hours of the day. Yet Lima is essentially a Spanish-American 
city, for all that; where the pallid, waxy complexion of the gente 
decente is much in evidence. The women of this caste are often beau- 
tiful; so, for that matter, are the men. In a population that may 
almost be termed cosmopolitan, the Chinaman holds a considerable 
place. After the abolition of slavery in 1855, large numbers of 
coolies were imported for the plantations of the Peruvian coast, and 
Celestials of higher caste have since taken advantage of Peru's open- 
door policy and the Japanese steamship lines. So that to-day there 
are temples and joss-houses and opium dens in Lima, and men in 
" European " dress, who are not Europeans, lean in the doorways of 
old colonial mansions transformed into Oriental shops. The Chinese 
of Lima occupy a wider field of activity than almost anywhere else 
in the Western hemisphere. Not only is a large percentage of the 
retail and restaurant business in their hands, but scores of herbolarios, 
" herbists," we might say, have stretched their signs across the old- 
time facades and blinded miradores of what were in viceregal days 
the residences of haughty families. Only the old men still cling to the 
national dress, and the pigtail has entirely disappeared. Here, too, 
the Chinaman sinks to depths not familiar to us of the north, and not 
only does the race furnish many of the street-sweepers of the capital, 
but it is no rare sight to see an oval-eyed personification of poverty 
hobbling along the main thoroughfares " shooting snipes " in the gut- 
ters. 

The " masses " of Lima dwell in vecindades, which are none the 
less tenements for being packed together on the ground floor along 
either side of narrow callejones, blind alleys in which all the ac- 
tivities of the household from baby's bath to the worship of a tin 
Virgin intermingle, instead of being piled one above the other. The 
better houses are spacious and airy within, though outwardly mo- 
notonous, built of mud and cane and plaster, their facades here re- 
sembling marble at a distance, there painted pale blue, or pink, or 
yellow. In the mud-and-bamboo Cathedral, the most imposing in 
appearance in Spanish America, the mummified skeleton of Pizarro, 
the jaws wired like those of some prehistoric creature in a museum, 
is made a peep-show, after the crude Spanish fashion. The " Cine " 
has all but driven out the theater and whatever of national or racial 
the latter brought with it. The visitor who knows no Spanish could 
easily guess the business of a shop announcing itself a " Plomeria y 

326 



ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL 

Gasfiteria." The Lima barber, calling his establishment a " Peluqueria 
y Perfumeria," leaves no doubt as to what effeminate fate may befall 
one who ventures into his den. 

This mid-winter season of July and August, they say, is no time to 
see Lima at its best. The traveler who has been a thousand times 
assured that rain never falls on the coast of Peru will be astonished 
to find the streets often slimy and soaking wet with garua, the Scotch 
mist that turns everything clammy and chill, yet never reaches the point 
where the shops find it worth while to include umbrellas among their 
stock. For days, and even weeks, the sun is invisible, and the capital 
lies heavy under leaden skies and a muggy blanket of mist, cold, dank, 
and gloomy. That is a rare day in this season when a brilliant sun 
makes it worth while to climb San Cristobal hill, a bare, peaked, rock- 
and-shale pyramid rising close above Lima on the north, from which 
he who has chosen his time well may catch a view not only of Callao 
and its island framed by the intense blue of the Pacific, but of the snow- 
clads of the Sierra. The city with its 160,000 inhabitants lies flat in 
its arid setting, the disk of the bull-ring in the foreground, an irregu- 
lar triangle with its base resting on the babbling Rimac, without chim- 
neys, almost without smoke-stacks; for its industries are still chiefly 
confined to handicraft. The red tiles that give the prevailing color to 
the cities of the Andes are here unknown. The roofs, made of sticks 
and mud, are flat, like those of Palestine, and are the family prome- 
nades and garbage-grounds, and the abode of smaller live stock, espe- 
cially of roosters, whose raucous saluting of each new day is not to be 
escaped by the most fortunate resident. Cock-fighting is still the most 
popular sport of the cholo classes. It is impossible to appear in public 
without being pestered by a constant procession of suerteros — offering 
suerte, or luck — vendors of lottery-tickets who fill the streets with 
their bawling from morning — late morning, for Lima is no early 
riser — to midnight. 

For all its modern aspect, Lima is still Latin-American in tempera- 
ment. Dawn brings to light personal habits little less reprehensible 
than those of Quito. A package of films mailed from the LTnited 
States cost me two days of red-tape at the post-office, and the charges 
exceeded the original cost. A dozen bags of mail from the north were 
lost in Callao harbor through the inexcusable carelessness of the barge- 
men ; the government refused to make reparation to the addressees on 
the ground that the law relieved it of responsibility for " unavoidable 
losses by shipwreck ! " An abortive revolution enlivened the last days 

327 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

of July. Strolling into the plaza one evening, I was jostled by a group 
of youthful roughs firing revolvers into the air as they went. That 
night the mob assaulted the home of a former president, with casuali- 
ties of three killed and a dozen wounded, and the executive of a year 
before was lodged in a cell at the penitentiary. Yet the films at a 
" Cine " a block away ran on without a tremor, and but for the fact 
that the shops took down their shutters somewhat later than usual, 
there was nothing left next morning to recall the occurrence. A few 
days later the principal newspaper announced solemnly that the ex- 
president had gone to Panama " for motives of health." 

The national museum was officially open, though unofficially closed, 
on the day of my visit. But the experienced traveler can always 
win his point with the doorkeeper of a South American institution, 
and I was soon treading the resounding halls between lines of a dead 
world's relics. Mummies from prehistoric days, their knees drawn 
up to their chins, a look half of disgust, half of pain on their osseous 
features, squatted along a wall. Some were still covered with many- 
colored wrappings, enclosing in clumsy bundles not merely their bodies, 
but all their possessions, their protruding heads still in fantastic masks 
and wigs, just as they had been found in the burial caves of the 
Sierra. Others, reputed Incas, were contained in huge bales in which 
they stood erect, as befitted their high caste, their heads unmasked, the 
whole covered with a well-preserved linen-like cloth. The floor of 
one large room was completely covered with hundreds of skulls in 
careful rows. Some showed prehistoric trepanning, irregular holes 
sawed out of them, and the subsequent growth of the bone proving 
that the warrior had lived long after his ^-frthrow in battle. A 
drowsy cholo was breaking up skeletons ar.u rawing earth out of 
skulls with the expressionless placidity with which he might have 
sorted potatoes. 

The director deigned to show me in person through the gallery of 
paintings. We paused first before an immense canvas depicting the 
funeral of Atahuallpa. 

" A modern work ? " I remarked, merely to make conversation. 

" No, no, senor," replied the director vehemently, " that is antigua. 
It was painted nearly forty years ago." 

" The fat priest is Valverde, I suppose, and this man with a beard 
must be Pizarro? " 

" Just so, senor, and the man behind is Pizarro's brother, Almagro." 

"His brother?" 

328 




The semi-weekly lottery drawing in the main plaza of Lima. Two of the men who turn the 

hollow spheres are blind, and the boys who thrust in a hand to draw out a number are 

supposedly below the age of corruption 




All aboard! A Sunday excursion tl it was not posed, but was snapped just as it came along 
the road near Pachacamac on the Peruvian coast 



ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL 

But the director persisted in the unhistorical relationship, in which 
he was confirmed by an assistant, in spite of the fact that the figure in 
question represented a man some fifteen years younger than the chief 
Conquistador. 

"Why is the back of Almagro's head missing?" 

u Ah, sefior," sighed the director, with a shrug of the shoulders, 
" What would you ? The Chilians cut out this picture and carried it 
home. It used to be several feet longer, and there Were many other 
caballeros in the group." 

Among whom was the real Almagro, no doubt. I made the circuit 
of the gallery, then turned an inquiring eye on my companion. 

" Ah — er — you are looking for the picture that used to be here ? " 
he stammered, quick to catch my expression. 

" Yes, the famous portrait of Pizarro." 

" Well, it used to hang right here," said the director, pointing to a 
blank space on the wall, as at some object of extraordinary interest. 
" But a few weeks ago the Sefior Presidente de la Republica sent for 
it, because he wants it in his own house." 

On my return I dropped in at the University of San Marcos, oldest 
in America and antedating our most ancient by nearly a century. It 
was pitifully like other Latin-American schools. The rector, having 
led me through a dozen empty school-rooms grouped about several 
patios, and having given the history in detail of a collection of silver 
cups " graciously awarded the University " by the king of this and the 
emperor of that, expressed unbounded surprise that I should wish to 
see a class at work. When it became evident that he could not shake 
me off with babbling courtesies, he pointed out the door of a class in law 
and disappeared, as if he would not have it known who was responsi- 
ble for the unusual intrusion. Some twenty-five young men, not so 
young either, being almost all adorned with mustaches, were lounging 
on benches of the amphitheater. The professor, comfortably seated 
in a sort of pulpit, was reading in' a languid and utterly dispassionate 
voice — not a lecture he had himself prepared, but from a book pur- 
chasable at a dollar or two, and readable, I trust, by the students 
themselves. Meanwhile the students napped, wrote letters, exchanged 
jokes, and discussed with their neighbors the extraordinary advent of 
a stranger in their midst. No doubt they had some other means and 
place of acquiring the knowledge indispensable even to a South Amer- 
ican lawyer; but what they gained by attending classes was hard to 
guess. I had been the object of curiosity for some time before the 

329 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

professor caught sight of me. He left off reading at once, and sparred 
for time with a string of stale pedagogical jokes until I saw fit to re- 
move my annoying presence. Other class-rooms demonstrated that 
famous old San Marcos is still in the world of long ago, its methods 
of instruction as antiquated as its text-books, heritages of a Jesuitical 
past, unavoidably so because of the rarity of Spanish translations of 
modern works. 

During all July my ambition remained at a low ebb, and my most 
extended acquaintance was with the medical profession. " Yu Sui, 
Herbolario de Pekin, physician extraordinary to his Excellency, the 
Chinese Minister," assured me I had dysentery, but no fever, and con- 
cocted the daily bottle of herbs accordingly. The chief Italian spe- 
cialist based his treatment on the fact that I had fever, but no dysentery. 
Fortunately Lima has not yet been invaded by that sect that would 
have robbed me of the gloomy pleasure of having anything. Every 
gringo who had ever ventured a hundred miles into the interior had his 
own individual " sure cure " ; and I had reached the point where I 
would have worn a tin charm about my neck, had anyone asserted it 
efficacious. Yet when once I had discovered a real physician, Anglo- 
Saxon in blood and of tropical experience, the remedy — intermus- 
cular injections of emmetine — was quickly effective. 

A no less potent factor in the recovery, however, was the hospitality 
of mine own people in Bellavista (" Beyabi'ta," locally) on the out- 
skirts of Callao. Genuine electric-cars sped across the cool, flat coun- 
try in a brief half-hour, from the capital to the edge of the Pacific I 
had not seen since landing In Cartagena thirteen months before. Here 
it was often brilliant summer, and from the housetop promenade 
spread out all Callao harbor, jutting La Punta, and the island of San 
Lorenzo in their intense blue setting, and perhaps even the snow-white 
line of the Sierra, while over the capital, a bare eight miles away, hung 
the opaque, mid-winter blanket of haze and gloom. The beach was 
near at hand, the sea-breeze constant, and the soporific roar of the surf 
never silent. The landscape, flat and arid, had a charm of its own, 
and a network of mud fences, on the broad tops of which one might 
promenade for miles. 

One Sunday during convalescence I visited ancient Pachacamac. 
Swift interurban cars bore us through morning-misty Miraflores and 
Barranco to Chorillos, proudest watering-place of the rainless Peru- 
vian coast, where we mounted horses and rode away into the desert by 
a broad trail that paralleled the shore within hearing of the dull roll 

330 



ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL 

of the surf. It was a veritable Sahara, in which the sand, everywhere 
ankle-deep, lay in wind-blown ridges. The horizon rose before us 
as at sea, and the mirage of heat-waves seemed rivers flowing land- 
ward. The uncorrected imagination is wont to picture the coast of 
Peru as utterly flat, as well as sandy. It is so only in part. Hills of 
sand that were almost mountains stretched down to the sea, like but- 
tresses fashioned to support the mammoth wall of the Andes that 
bounded the horizon on the left. The summits of many were hidden 
in mists, the gariia from which had given life to the brilliant green 
lomas and patches where flocks feed in certain seasons; and the smil- 
ing valley of Lurin, watered by a stream smaller than the Rimac and 
still cold from the snows above, was as inviting in its contrast to the 
repulsive, naked hills as any desert oasis. Down on the floor of the 
valley this, too, seemed sandy and dry, but the acequias that still water 
it, as in the days of the Incas, sustain a wilderness of scrubby trees, 
among which a chiefly negro population lolls in open-work huts. Na- 
ture seems to have arranged her seasons with foresight here; for 
when the garua gives way to blazing summer, the rainy season and the 
melting snows above swell the rivers to a volume that affords wide- 
spread irrigation. 

Pachacamac, the Animator of the Universe, not to be confused with 
the Sun-god of the Incas, had his temple on the edge of this forbidding 
waste of sand, overlooking the sea that chafes incessantly at its feet. 
It was the Benares of the ancient Peruvians, not merely because it 
drew pilgrims from all the surrounding world, but because here those 
who could brought and disposed of their dead. Conquered by the 
Incas nearly two centuries before the coming of the Spaniards, a 
Temple of the Sun was added; but the sun-worshippers, like their 
conquerors in turn, were too politic to suppress the earlier religion en- 
tirely, and merely merged it with their own. " In a room closely shut 
and stinking," says Estete, the Spanish chronicler, " was an idol made 
of wood, very dirty, which they called god, who creates and sustains 
us. It was held in great veneration and at its feet were offerings." 
Different, indeed, from many an Andean place of worship to-day! 
It is a place of death in a double sense. Scuttling lizards and sand- 
vipers are the only forms of life that accentuate its silent, repulsive 
sterility. Human skulls kick about underfoot through all the extent 
of the ruins, and disintegrated skeletons lie everywhere. Only the 
earthen pots and huacos are of financial value to the looters ; the heads 
of the men who made them are not worth the gathering. The ruins 

331 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

are extensive, a few of the great terraced temples still moderately well 
preserved. But being of clay or adobe, dreary, yellow-brown, they 
offer no contrast in color to the surrounding desert hills, and nothing 
to compare with the splendid wrought-stone monuments of those 
wonderful architects, the ancient Peruvians of the highlands. 

The year had run over into September before I turned my face 
upward again toward the Sierra, to pick up the broken thread of my 
journey. Beyond Chosica the naked hills closed in, and the train 
climbed all day between barren, echoing walls of rock, the exhilarat- 
ing mountain air cutting ever deeper into my lungs, as the glorious 
Italian skies of the cloudless upper plateau spread their ever-broad- 
ening canopy above. Snow appeared on far-off peaks, descended to 
meet us, and spread in patches about and below us. As the air thinned, 
our faces flushed and tingled ; a tendency to sleepiness was succeeded 
by a feeling of exhilaration and an inclination to grow talkative. My 
fellow-passengers began to show signs of distress at the altitude, 
growing more and more red-faced, with bloodshot eyes ; then one by 
one they frankly succumbed to mountain sickness as the train con- 
tinued inexorably upward. As the experienced sailor struts about 
among his seasick fellows, so I caught myself gazing with haughty 
scorn upon the weaklings about me. Obviously a man who had 
tramped the lofty paramos from far-off Bogota, often under a heavy 
pack, was immune to any effects of altitude. 

But there is imbedded in ancient literature something to the effect 
that pride is often closely attended by a downfall. At Ticlio, in the 
crisp, cold afternoon, I noted that the mere exertion of lifting my bag- 
gage from the main to the branch-line train set my heart in a strange 
flutter. A more cautious person, too, would not have drunk three 
cups of black coffee in the miserable little station lunch-room so 
soon after weeks of rigid diet. Laboriously we climbed to the highest 
railroad point in the world, flanked by an immense blue glacier, up 
again on the bare, treeless, silent pampas, among cobble-stone hovels 
and ichu, the stolid, expressionless Indians of the highlands, and drew 
up at dusk in Morococha. The cheerless mining-camp, more than 
three miles above the sea, lay scattered along a dreary, bowl-shaped 
valley, with a vista of three cold, steel-blue lagoons, across which the 
enclosing snowclads threw their violet evening shadows. In this 
breathless region my pulse started savagely at every exertion, but being 
already arrived, I supposed myself as safe from mountain sickness as 
a disembarking passenger from mal de mer. In the manager's cozy, 

332 



ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL 

stone-walled quarters the blazing fireplace, with its unaccustomed arti- 
ficial heat and its clouds of tobacco-smoke, threatened suffocation 
and forced me to step out frequently into the crisp, night air to catch 
my breath. But no Indian of the highland could have boasted him- 
self in finer physical spirits when we wandered away toward ten, pant- 
ing considerably, to be sure, even at a very moderate pace, up the 
slope to the superintendent's dwelling. 

Barely had I turned in, however, when I began gasping for breath. 
Within an hour my host found that I had a respiration of 52 and a 
pulse of 125. All night long I struggled open-mouthed, with the 
sound of an accelerated steam-pump in bad repair, my heart engaged 
in what promised to be a successful attempt to pound its way out 
through my back, until my very shoulderblades ached, and all the 
valley of Morococha seemed to echo with its thumping. It was too 
much! To be scarcely recovered from one long, laborious, Andean 
ailment, only to blow up of my own steam in this absurd land ! 

In the morning the mine-doctor came with his stethescope, mumbled 
" soroche " in a weary, unsympathetic voice, left some pills and in- 
structions, and was gone. All day long I lay fasting, the snowclads 
gazing down upon me with icy, Andean indifference. Gradually the 
pounding of my heart ceased to drown out all other sounds, and my 
lungs resumed their accustomed action. On the following morning, 
though still weak and wobbly-legged, aching from crown to toe, I was 
able to be about, the day after, I strode slowly about the camp with 
something of the oldtime vigor. In the end the experience seemed to 
be advantageous, for with every day thereafter I advanced to a fault- 
less physical condition that was to accompany me on all the rest of the 
journey. 

There are a score of theories concerning this mountain-sickness, 
known throughout Peru by the Quichua word soroche and in the 
basin of the Titicaca as puna. Who may be subject to it, what will 
prevent it, whether or not previous experience will or will not give 
immunity, are even greater mysteries than those surrounding its proto- 
type, the bugbear of ocean travel. No two persons are ever affected 
alike by it. Commonly it is accompanied by a raging headache. All 
foreigners contracted for mine employment in this region are sub- 
jected to a rigid physical examination before they ascend " the Hill," 
yet it is not unusual to make up a special train and rush a victim down 
to the coast. Among horses, with which it takes the form of blind- 
staggers and often renders the animal unfit for further service, it is 

333 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

known as veta, from the aboriginal superstition that it is caused by 
veins of ore (vetas) in the earth. 

Morococha, like its rival, Cerro de Pasco, is a little world of its 
own, exclusively mining in its raison d'etre and considerably marked 
by Anglo-Saxon influence. Though many of the natives still hud- 
dle in dismal huts, without windows and with dirt floors, the civilizing 
effect of the gringo is in some evidence, at least in those superficial 
matters of small habits, amusements, and clothing. American hob- 
nailed boots are almost as frequently worn by the Indian men as the 
llanqui, or hairy cowhide sandal. Bitter cold though it is, even at 
noonday, the Indians of female persuasion go scantily clad and almost 
universally barefoot. 

The miners work nine hours a day, seven days a week, and re- 
ceive an average of something more than a dollar a day — a high 
wage from the Andean Indian point of view. The considerable effi- 
ciency of both Indian and cholo workmen is curtailed by much coca- 
chewing and hard drinking. Following each pay-day, and during the 
many fiestas, a majority of the native miners go on an extended de- 
bauch, leaving the mines often so short-handed that operations vir- 
tually cease. The effect of the celebration does not wear off for 
several days, so that enterprise is commonly paralyzed a week or more 
in every month. The company is powerless to remedy this drawback, 
and the government — that scapegoat of all imperfections throughout 
South America — shows no disposition to better conditions, even were 
it possible. An Indian injured in the mine is more apt to run away 
than to report at the hospital, and to appear later as a litigant against 
the company, demanding — and with government aid frequently win- 
ning — a sinecure for life. Even when the injured man is attended 
by the mine-doctor, and his broken leg bound with splints or his 
wound properly treated with antiseptic care, he is likely to be found 
next morning with the bandages torn off, and with coca leaves, or a 
chicken leg, or something as efficacious substituted. 

It must be admitted that his gringo superiors do not set the native 
miner a perfect example in his chief vice, the excessive consumption 
of alcohol. In the social vacuum that must necessarily exist in such 
a community, drinking and gambling are the favorite methods of 
putting to rout dull care. The altitude soon gets on the nerves, seem- 
ing to call for some such stimulant ; at least, it is the custom to " lay 
to the altitude " any species of misdemeanor, or the formation of 
habits unknown to the subject before his arrival. Somehow it strikes 

334 



ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL 

the passing observer as wicked to send these small-lunged, sea-level 
men of other climes up here to gasp through life at a height fitted 
only to the barrel-chested Indian and his fellow-beast of burden, the 
llama. Both physically and temperamentally the effect of the alti- 
tude is curious. Water boils at so low a temperature that a finger 
can almost be thrust into it with impunity. Fireplaces are set in ac- 
tion by nonchalantly throwing two or three beer-bottlesful of kerosene 
into the blaze. Those accustomed to the heights for generations are 
far sturdier and less vivacious than those of lower levels. New- 
comers, on the other hand, are easily excited and rattle-brained, dash- 
ing about like the proverbial " hen with its head cut off," futile in 
proportion to their striving. In the gringo community it is a stand- 
ing jest that the American or Englishman most phlegmatic at sea-level 
will spend an hour trying to shave, and grow so hen-minded over 
that simple task that he often gives up in despair. The exhilara- 
tion is physical as well as mental. Baseball players, far from losing 
their customary prowess in this thin air, are given to running their 
legs off in their excitement, and must often be restrained lest they burst 
their lungs. 

It is half-jokingly asserted that after a few months in the mines it 
is not safe to open a bottle or a " jack-pot " in the presence of a min- 
ister's son. Unfortunately the jest seems to have serious basis in 
fact. The tighter the lines that bound their youth, the more com- 
pletely do the newcomers cast them off when removed from the in- 
fluence of home ties and neighborly opinion. Small wonder the 
Latin races accuse the Anglo-Saxon of hypocrisy. The Americans 
who live and mine up and down the Sierra have convinced Peruvians 
that every living American drinks quarts of whiskey neat every day, 
and squanders his substance in gambling, or if luck runs his way, in 
the " stews " of Lima. This is not to say that all gringos in Morococha 
and Cerro de Pasco fall into an evil manner of life, or that there are 
not many more who perform their tasks fully and efficiently, in spite 
of an occasional debauch. Those who bring with them very strong 
wills, or some equivalent for them, retain the tautness of their moral 
fiber, for all the altitude. The percentage of men who go astray is 
such, however, that it becomes almost a subject for congratulation to 
see a well-kept frame and a wholesome, unlined face in these Andean 
communities, where dissipated countenances are rather the rule than 
the exception. Then, too, often arriving as youths, with little expe- 
rience of life except the half-cloistered one of our colleges, the younger 

335 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

seem to feel it necessary to prove themselves " men," and to keep up 
the local reputation for what a missionary referred to as " those rough 
mining fellows " by assuming a bold, gruff, even vulgar exterior. All 
question of " morality " aside, the mere materialistic problem of keep- 
ing up the efficiency of their force would seem to make some curtail- 
ment of the prevailing customs worth the trouble of the mine-owners. 
But even those sent down to assume charge too often fall victims to 
that false philosophy of " a short life and a merry one." 

Gringo employees of higher rank command generous salaries and 
are well housed, with all the comforts that can conveniently be trans- 
ported to this lofty region. Coming, for the most part, directly from 
England or the United States, they take naturally to the artificial heat 
which the natives rarely adopt. Before the fireplace at the club the 
conversation jumps from " bridge " to tetrahydrite ore, and back again 
to poker with, to the layman, a vertiginous speed, amid the rattle of 
glasses and bottles and the strains of a tireless phonograph. A con- 
siderable portion of the talk might frankly be called gossip; for 
South America has this in common with small towns, that every 
gringo up and down the continent knows every other, at least by 
hearsay, his private character and his domestic difficulties. 

The traveler through South America is frequently struck by the 
fact that large enterprises, even British in ownership, are more often 
than not actually and practically in charge of Americans. The man- 
ager and most of the office force may be English, but the actual mo- 
tive power, the man who makes the ore fly or sets the trains to run- 
ning, is apt to be a youthful superintendent or engineer but a few 
years out of one of our technical colleges. This is no argument for 
or against the mentality or ability of either nationality. These are 
their natural spheres of action, purely the result of environment. The 
American, coming from a land where precedent is given short shrift, 
and accustomed to furnish his own initiative, is best fitted for pushing 
the pioneer work, for attacking unprecedented problems and carrying 
the enterprise on to the point where it is established and running 
smoothly. The Englishman, product of an older and more settled 
society, is more easily content to continue an established under- 
taking, to " stick on the job," while the American moves on to attack 
new and unfamiliar problems. 

I visited the chief mines of Morococha with the youthful American 
superintendent. They presented nothing unusual to one acquainted 
with those of Mexico, than which they were slightly more crude and 

336 




The bleak mining town of Morococha, more than 16,000 feet above sea-level. Though 
but twelve degrees south of the equator, dawn often finds the place completely 
covered with snow, and ice forms on the edges of the chain of lakes, 
» the outlet from which is to the Amazon 




The American miners of Morococha live in comfort for all the altitude and bleakness of 

their surroundings. In spite of their example, however, the natives still shiver 

through the day and huddle through the night without artificial heat 



ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL 

undeveloped in their methods. Some details of life were different; 
the peons wore plenty of clothing, ragged and extremely bedraggled, 
hats, and even footwear, for it was little less cold down in the mine 
galleries than in the crisp, wintry mountain air and the brilliant yet 
chill sunshine that flooded the glacier-draped valley and the indigo- 
blue lakes above. We climbed and crawled and dragged ourselves by 
elbows, knees, shoulders, hands and feet through ancient and modern 
" stopes," by slippery ladders, crude stairways, or slimy ropes, in an 
eternal darkness made barely visible by our torches. The Indian 
miners, some of them but half-grown boys, each and all had a cheek 
puffed out by a quid of coca. They took a half-hour " coca-time " 
each afternoon, as religiously as an Englishman does for his tea. Those 
who shoveled away the mountain of ore in the sunshine outside earned 
seventy cents a day; in the Natividad mine, where water poured in- 
cessantly and required oilskins, the workmen nearly doubled this wage. 
The practical gringo miners of to-day had somewhat different views of 
the ancient Peruvian civilization than its historians, and considered 
the stories of Inca wealth vastly exaggerated. Many a time, to be 
sure, a vein that promised rich reward was soon found to have been 
" stoped out " by the Incas or colonial Spaniards ; but these neither 
knew enough about effective mining, nor went deep enough to get any 
such quantity of gold as tradition ascribes to them. Moreover, copper 
is the chief ore of Peru, and even silver owes its importance here al- 
most entirely to the fact that the copper is highly argentiferous. 

Beyond Oroya the railways of central Peru spread out in a Y, at 
the right-hand end of which is Huancayo, something more than two 
hundred miles from Lima, as is Cerro de Pasco on the other branch. 
Some time after the hour set, an engine was found somewhere in or 
about the junction, and toward noon we drifted away down a gorge 
into which portly, dry hills thrust themselves alternately from either 
side. Country women were washing their clothes in the scanty river; 
here and there, at the base of amphitheatrical bluffs, wheat was being 
threshed under the hoofs of circling horses. There were several 
dust-blown stations, but no signs of towns, nor, indeed, a patch on which 
one might have existed, except the one mud village of Llocllapampa 
in mid-afternoon, familiar with its old Andean red-tile roofs. In the 
first-class car was a crowd almost exclusively Peruvian, huge scarfs 
and shawls about their throats, and many in overcoats ; for not only 
had Americans in their leather leggings disappeared, but even the out- 
ward evidence of gringo influence ; and I was once more swallowed up 

337 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

in the purely native life of the Sierra. At length the gorge closed in, 
squeezed us through three tunnels, and there opened out an inter- 
andean valley, spreading far away north and south, cloud-shadows 
flecking its surface, two snowclad peaks contemplating us with a 
lofty disdain from over the crest of the enclosing wall. The train 
turned crab-wise toward the nearer end of the valley, and set us down 
within walking distance of Jauja. 

The famous " Xauxa " of Prescott is rather colorless in its person- 
ality and barren in its setting. The bells of llama trains, followed by 
their as soft- footed, coca-chewing drivers, jangled by my window and 
died away down the street. A considerable proportion of the popula- 
tion was constantly struggling about the hydrant in the center of the 
plaza ; the rest were either simple Indians with coca- and pisco-brutal- 
ized faces, or the haughty keepers of glorified peanut-stands. Smoke 
there was none, of course, neither of industry nor of domestic com- 
fort, and in contrast to the bitter cold nights and the ice-box frigidity 
of every shade and shadow, the uncovered sun was burning. Not 
even the murmur of open sewers broke the langorous Andean silence, 
and in nothing but a few slight details was the monotony of all towns 
of the Sierra broken. I was back once more in the kingdom of 
candles, with its dreary, interminable, read-less evenings. 

The ancient Inca highway passed through " Sausa," on the heights 
above the present town, the beginnings of which Pizarro laid on his 
way to Cuzco. The ruins were far more easily accessible than those 
of Huamachuco, and neither so important nor so throttled with vege- 
tation. The surviving walls are chiefly of broken stone, some of lines 
of square, some of round, rooms. The chief ruins appeared to have 
been a double line of fortresses, which hung on the brow of the hill 
with a truly Incaic view over the surrounding world. Strictly speak- 
ing, these were not Inca monuments, but constructions of the Huancas, 
improved by the Emperors of Cuzco. The tribe that once inhabited 
this broad valley were conquered by the militant Incas, and forced to 
give tribute and adopt the tongue of their conquerors, a dialect of 
which still persists in the region. The plain was once a lake-bottom, 
stretching from beyond Jauja to distant Huancayo. An hour's walk 
from the town still brings one to a cool and placid lagoon, surrounded 
by all but impenetrable marshes and reeds, with numerous wild ducks 
winging their V-shaped course across it. To-day the Mantaro river, 
like an unravelled cord, swings southward past a few pueblocitos, 

338 



ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL 

among green groves that give relieving touches of color to a scene at 
best bald and barren in aspect. 

Long before train-time most of the population of Jauja, having no 
better means of whiling away the afternoon, wandered out along the 
dusty road to the station, isolated as some house of pestilence. That 
American habit of racing breathlessly across the platform at the last 
moment is not prevalent in Peru. For one thing, the boleteria ceases 
to " function " long before the scheduled hour of departure, and he 
who embarks without a ticket subjects himself to a fifty percent, in- 
crease in fare — unless he has the fortune to be a compadre of some 
member of the train-crew. In the second-class coach the travelers 
ranged from broad-faced Indians to cholos in " civilized " garb and 
rubber collars, the corresponding females wrapped from head to foot 
in crow-black mantos. With the human deluge came corpulently 
stuffed alforjas, crude implements of husbandry, distorted bundles of 
household effects, and, on the backs of the Indian women, bulky in 
their heavy skirts unevenly gathered about their draught-horse hips, 
loads of varying size from which, with few exceptions, peered the face 
of a wide-eyed baby. All these — the infants only excepted — my 
fellow-passengers proceeded to stuff under the four lengthwise 
benches, into the racks above, or to hang from the roof supports, until 
the car took on the aspect of an overstocked pawnshop in which a 
multitude of tenement dwellers had taken sudden refuge. 

Above the door was the information, " 96 asientos," all of which 
were all more than fully occupied when the engineer embraced the 
station-master for the last time and the massed population of Jauja 
began to recede into the distance. Within the car the prevailing 
tongue was Quichua. The native conductor " grafted " with a fetch- 
ing frankness here and there in his struggle through the welter of hu- 
manity; the brakemen spent most of the journey drinking the health 
of a group of cholos in a corner of the coach. Chicha flowed like 
water. At every station old women crowded through the car selling 
that nectar of the Incas, all purchasers drinking from the same cup, 
and generally several from the same filling, while the scrawny hags, 
waiting for its return, idly rubbed their bony talons about the spout 
of the cdntaro under their arms. Almost every traveler had his own 
supply of a more potent native beverage. The pisco bottle with its 
licorish smell passed constantly from hand to hand, eyes grew more 
and more bloodshot, tongues thicker, yet more talkative — for the 

339 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

Andean Indian is taciturn in exact proportion to his sobriety — eye- 
lids heavy, and limbs clumsy. The tippling knew no limits either of 
sex or age. Infants barely two years old frequently took a long drink 
at the fiery bottle, and cooed with delight at the taste. The railway 
company not only permitted, but abetted Peru's national vice. If 
the universal pastime threatened to flag for a moment, it was resusci- 
tated by the fifty-year old dwarf of a trainboy, who waded incessantly 
through our legs with a bottle under each arm and a single opaque glass 
in hand, urging all, from the aged Indian dreaming over the cud of 
coca in his cheek to the best-dressed chola, to drink and be merry, 
for to-morrow — he would be bound in the other direction. 

Not a few of the Indian and cholo girls were robustly pretty, their 
cheeks rosy in spite of their coppery tint. At one station there en- 
tered the car a white Peruvian baby, richly dressed as some little prin- 
cess, fingerless white gloves on her tiny hands, borne on the back of 
an unbelievably dirty Indian girl of twelve, whose filthy felt hat the 
regally clad infant alternately picked and thrust its fingers into its 
mouth. Its parents were enjoying babyless freedom with their friends 
in the first-class car, and incidentally saving the difference in the 
servant's fare. Thus the unwashed Indian intrudes everywhere, al- 
ways, from altar to kitchen, from nursemaid to grave-digger, and the 
fact never strikes the most haughty Andean as incongruous. Had 
the old Spanish chroniclers been of the realistic school, we should 
no doubt have learned that the Inca's bread was also dropped on a 
mud floor, and picked up with unwashed fingers before it was pre- 
sented to him on a golden platter. In all the pages of Prescott there 
is no suggestion of uncleanliness. His Indians are as spotless as 
if they had been scrubbed and scoured with New England zeal before 
they were admitted to the muslin-shaded twilight of his study. 
Yet he who has physically traveled through what was once the Em- 
pire of the Incas cannot but suspect that the Puritan-bred historian, for 
all his marvelously living and breathing masterpiece, inadvertently — 
or puritanically — gave in this respect a false picture of the ancient 
kingdom. 

It was nearing sunset when groves of eucalypti began to ride close by 
the train-windows, then rows of mud huts alternating with little farms 
of alfalfa, then larger adobe houses, and at length we drew up at 
Huancayo, the end of railroading in central Peru. For many years 
there have been plans to carry the railway on to Ayacucho, and even 
a wild project of some day pushing it across to Cuzco, and of linking it 

340 



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ROUND ABOUT THE PERUVIAN CAPITAL 

up with the railways of the south. Fortunately, nothing had yet come 
of the scheme, and what lay before me depended thereafter on my own 
exertions, with whatever of charm that remained to the ancient but 
now slightly traveled route through the heart of Peru, as the reward. 
Huancayo, boasting — as towns of the Sierra will — 10,000 inhabi- 
tants, in a rich and, in better seasons, well-watered valley, consists 
chiefly of one long, broad street, perhaps the broadest in Peru, paved 
with small, round stones, a ditch of water stagnating through its cen- 
ter. On either side it is lined by wrought-iron rejas and open shop- 
doors ; at either end it dies out in sand and cactus-bordered paths be- 
tween mud-huts. As the main plaza of Riobamba is to Ecuador, this 
street forms the center of what is reputed the greatest native market 
in Peru. Each Sunday it offers a pulsating vista of Indians from a 
hundred miles around, in every color known to an artist's palette — 
and some which the boldest of painters would not venture to use — an 
unbroken stretch of humanity, shimmering in the glaring sunshine. 
An expert stenographer might wander all day through the surging 
throng without being able to set down the mere names of the wares 
displayed, to say nothing of the endless variety of garments, types, 
faces, and customs. So packed with details is the far-famed market, 
that only a cinematograph ribbon could give even a faint notion of its 
activities; mere words are as powerless to paint its motley variety as 
to catch the subtle charm of Huancayo itself, with its perfect climate 
and crystalline sunshine. 



341 



CHAPTER XIV 

OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

THE truly romantic thing, of course, would have been to buy 
a llama to bear my burdens to the capital of the ancient 
Inca Empire. But however in keeping with the local color 
that prehistoric denizen of the Andes might have been, there were at 
least a score of cold, practical, modern reasons why he was not 
suited to my purpose. A few of them, such as pace, disposition, slight 
powers of sustained endurance, and uncompanionable temperament, 
experience had demonstrated native to a donkey, also. A horse, as a 
famous traveler has remarked, is a delicate and uncertain ally. A 
mule, in addition to several traits inherited from his paternal fore- 
bear, had the drawback of unattainability ; for the house of Rothchild 
£nd I have this in common — that our wealth is not unlimited. There 
remained, however, an animal unknown to mankind at large that fitted 
my requirements exactly, as exactly at least as is possible in this im- 
perfect world, — the Peruvian imitation of a horse. In a bare three 
centuries this descendent of our " fine lady among animals " has 
adapted himself to Andean conditions. His small, compact hoofs are 
almost as sure on precarious mountain-trails as those of the mule ; 
he is gifted with an uncomplaining endurance far beyond what his 
appearance suggests; and he possesses an even, peaceful temper, and 
an absence of ambition and personal initiative equal to his fellow- 
countryman, the Indian. Moreover, he is capable of sustaining life 
and strength for an indefinite period on the sparse and hardy vege- 
tation of the uplands, and is, at certain seasons, within reach of a 
modest purse. 

" Foxy's " mozo owned such a chusco and, the feast of his patron 
saint being near at hand, was induced to sell. I took to the animal 
at first sight. Not that he was a thing of beauty, in his shaggy coat 
of shedding reddish-brown; but it was this very air of unpretentious 
modesty and unAndean sense of duty over mere personal appear- 
ance that won my instant regard. Here, surely, was a companion who 
would keep his own counsel under the most trying circumstances. 

342 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

Being no larger than a large donkey, he was nicely fitted to the modest 
load of some sixty pounds that was destined to represent his share of 
the world's labor. Not merely was he newly shod, but he had been 
enjoying the unbroken freedom of a potrero for several days, and 
should therefore be in condition to hold his own for an indefinite 
period, provided I did not set too swift a pace. The masculine gender 
was an asset not to be overlooked. Not merely did my sense of chiv- 
alry forbid sentencing any member of the other sex to the hardships 
that rumor insisted lay before us, but once they had been surmounted, I 
would not have my glory smudged by the possibility of a mere female 
boasting that she had also accomplished the feat. Again, the animal 
had never been fifty miles east of Huancayo; and I am of those who 
find no pleasure in a trip with a companion who has already been over 
the route. The mere nine dollars at which we finally came to terms 
seemed a slight equivalent for all these virtues, though I took care not 
to hint that impression to the erstwhile owner. The matter of a name 
was no problem at all. Even the Peruvians unconsciously tacked on 
the diminutive it a as often as they referred to my new fellow-adven- 
turer, and it was natural that I should have instantly dubbed him 
Chusquito. 

Relieved of the necessity of being my own packhorse, I could 
somewhat increase my outfit. In Lima I had acquired a rum-burner, 
with coffee-pot, frying-pan, and soup-boiling attachments that closed 
up into a compact kitchenette about six inches in diameter. With 
this went a bottle of alcohol, that could be filled at any town 
" muy provisto de todo " along the way. " Foxy " himself, whose 
faults, as every gringo up and down the Andes knows, do not include 
a lack of generosity, insisted that he would be forced to throw away a 
somewhat worn, but still very serviceable, rubber poncho, unless I car- 
ried it off ; and this, with my llama-hair poncho from Quito, was des- 
tined to shield me from many a bitter night on lofty mountain-ranges. 
The clothing requisite for every possible variation of altitude, and 
photographic supplies sufficient to avoid the ill-will of local " authori- 
ties," made up the bulk of my alforjas. Then there was room for a 
native and a foreign book, for a half-liter of pisco, with which to win 
the esteem of isolated Indians, a bag of cocoa leaves and the accom- 
panying burnt-banana lime, to sustain such estimation, a candle for the 
endless Andean evenings, and a sufficient supply of imperishable food- 
stuffs to relieve my mind of the harrassing daily preoccupation of find- 
ing hospitality before dark. Even my coat and kodak could be hung 

343 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

on the pack, leaving me free to stride lazily along, dressed in my 
shirt-sleeves and a cynical smile. 

It was the tenth day of September when I creaked my hobnailed 
way out of Huancayo's interminable street, my only load the end of a 
clothes-line that tempered Chusquito's pace to my own. At the prin- 
cipal pulperia his former owner drank my health in pisco, and, though 
he shed no tear, it might easily have made a clean mark down his 
cheek. Of the road to Cuzco I knew nothing, except that it led 
through four " cities," and that I should never reach, much less bring 
my four-footed companion to, the end of a journey on which not even 
a " son of the country " would " venture himself " without a guide 
and a tropilla of mules and arrieros. For myself I had no misgiv- 
ings; as to Chusquito, I trusted to frequent halts and a militant 
attitude that should win him an unaccustomed wealth of fodder to 
confound the pessimists. All Huancayo gazed after me from their 
doorways with a mixture of astonishment and incredulity as I set out. 
Now is it not strange, when walking is the first and, indeed, the only 
natural means of locomotion, that people who look with complacency 
upon men on horseback, and upon trains, men who have heard of auto- 
mobiles and aeroplanes, should gasp with wonder to see a man journey- 
ing afoot ; and that andarines may go about living on the country and 
gathering certificates from every possible source to prove they do 
walk; as if there were any virtue in that action, except the purely 
personal pleasure of it, or nothing? 

Even the burden of the tow-rope did not last long. Chusquito, 
being an experienced pack-animal, I soon found could be left to his 
own devices. In his own country, he knew fully as well as I how 
to climb up and down rocky, mountain trails, and if he showed a 
tendency now and then to wander off across the pampa, especially at 
sight of some of his own kindred, it was natural that he should have 
been somewhat bored at merely human companionship. Within two 
days we were strolling along like lifelong friends, at an even gait that 
never called for cudgel acceleration, and I journeyed as serenely as if 
I had found at last that automatic baggage of which I had so long 
dreamed, only subconsciously aware that my possessions were march- 
ing peacefully before me. The mind ran unbidden over the many 
improvements that might be added, — a tent and more supplies ; or I 
might even become an itinerant photographer or peddler, and earn my 
way as I went, instead of greeting with disdainful silence the frequent 
question, " Que lleva de venta ? " But on one point I was quickly dis- 

344 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

illusioned. Somehow I had pictured a pack-animal as simply a per- 
ambulating chest of drawers, fancying that I had merely to hang my 
possessions on the animal's back, snatching up anything as I chanced to 
need it. Whereas in real life I found that everything must be made 
snug and tight, and secured by the intricate " diamond-hitch " that 
made it as inaccessible on the march as if it had been left behind. 

At Pucara, where the great valley of the Huancas narrows and 
begins to squeeze the trail upward, the inhabitants were killing a cow 
and stringing it up between two trees in the center of the grass-grown 
plaza. All the beef that could not be disposed of on the spot was cut 
into sheets a half-inch thick, and left to dry in the sun. By reason 
of this treatment all meat in the Andes is hopelessly tough ; either it is 
" green," direct from the hand of the butcher, or charqui of sole- 
leather properties. Veal is unknown, for who would slaughter a calf 
that would grow up into several times its weight in beef ? Mutton is 
scarce, or treated to the same charqui-ing process; and pork is of 
Hebraic rarity. Besides, the traveler who longs for a rasher of crisp 
bacon is more easily content to assuage his appetite in beef when ex- 
perience has taught him what the pigs of the Andes feed on. 

There was no public eating-house in Pucara. A party of a dozen 
men and women, however, all more or less gay with pisco, were glad 
of assistance in making away with their share in the weekly killing. 
I tied Chusquito before a bundle of wheat straw at a corner of the 
plaza, and we crowded around a wabbly-legged table in a neighbor- 
ing mud room, and dined amid an uproar of maudlin hilarity and a 
series of stories often of a distinctly " raw " nature, in which the 
females easily held their own. Here cancha, or toasted, ripe, shelled 
corn did duty as bread, and each helping of beef was flanked by 
boiled chuiio, or small, frozen potatoes. Then there were camotes de 
la sierra, one of the several species of the potato family unknown in 
other lands, a soft, sweetish, mushy tuber of the shape of a large 
peanut, which it was a la mode to pick from the plate with the fingers, 
and dip before each bite into the general bowl of aji, the Incaic pep- 
pers so beloved of the ancient Peruvians. As in all Peru, it was the 
custom here to drink the health of a companion and expect him to 
round the circle ad infinitum et intoxicatum. Luckily, my companions 
were so far gone in liquor, even before my arrival, that I managed to 
avoid most of the fiery " copitas " without giving offense. 

In the group was the cholo school-master of the baked-mud Es- 
cuela Fiscal de Varones across the plaza. He was a native of Car- 

345 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

huaz, and grew so excited over the extraordinary fact that I had not 
only been in his birthplace but had traveled thence " by land " that, 
irrespective of the pisco, he was unable to begin the afternoon session 
when the boys gathered at one o'clock. It didn't matter anyway, 
he confided, since he spoke no Quichua and the pupils almost no 
Spanish, and he would get his salary — whenever the government had 
the money — whether he pretended to teach or not. The school 
system of Peru being centralized, like that of France, orders from 
Lima sometimes transfer a maestro from one province to another with- 
out any notion as to whether or not he is fitted to his new assignment. 
The boys, all but one of whom were at least half Indian, could mispro- 
nounce a few sentences from the " Lives of the Saints," but few 
could recognize one letter from another. Though he had nothing to 
show in the way of teaching, the maestro pointed with pride to the 
school-name in huge red letters, all but covering the adobe facade, as 
an example of his handiwork and " culture." We spent an hour or 
more in posing the school for a group in the act of saluting the 
national flag, the " teacher " insisting on changing his brilliant red 
poncho for a khaki coat before he would face the kodak, and of 
course he grew enraged because I was so miserly as to refuse to deliver 
a dozen copies of the picture on the spot. Another round of " copi- 
tas " restored his amiability, however, and he insisted on giving me 
" something not to forget him by," and forced upon me one of the 
unvarnished lead-pencils which the government supplied his pupils. 

Travelers were frequent on the vast, rising world beyond, where the 
great valley of the Huantas shrivelled .and disappeared into the past. 
Indian women trotted by, not only with a load and a baby on their 
backs, but often suckling the infant as they went. Ccoto, as the Incas 
called goitre, was common. Llama-trains, driven by fishy-eyed, 
noiseless Indians with colored rags around their heads under their 
thick, gray felt hats, passed frequently. There are few more inter- 
esting sights than that afforded by two of these trains shuttling through 
each other on a narrow mountain trail, each animal keeping its course 
as unerringly as a homing-pigeon. At a rocky turn of the road one of 
the frail beasts lay dying, an Indian boy slashing the gay ribbons out of 
its still quivering ears with a crude cutlass. Chusquito strongly 
objected to passing a scene so fraught with the dangers and cruelties 
of the trail. It was our first real difference of opinion. From Inca 
days it seems to have been the custom to decorate the ears of llamas 
with these bits of bright cloth, less from artistic notions than as a 

346 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

means of designating the ownership. To-day even the cows, bulls, 
goats, and sheep of certain regions are thus embellished — often with 
ludicrous results. When, as here, the matter is carried so far as to 
beribbon the donkeys, it seems time to call a halt; for what can look 
more absurdly incongruous than a plodding ass solemnly waving with 
the monotonous rhythm of his gait his gaily bedecked ears. 

Beyond Marcavalle, on the second day, the stony road was for a 
time even more densely populated by llama, donkey, and mule-trains, 
by haughty, white-collared gentry ahorse, and villagers afoot, all, — 
" gente," arrieros, Indians of both sexes, and, one could almost be- 
lieve, the very llamas — silly or stupid with drink. Even the women 
chewed coca, each bulging cheek suggesting a cud of tobacco. Indian 
women, that is, for in a land where every man rides it is the rarest 
sight to see a woman on horseback; and even the chola who drags 
her skirts through the accumulations of years in her native hamlet, 
would sooner break the seventh commandment than ride astride. 
Then bit by bit the travel died out; the single telegraph wire strode 
knock-kneed away over an uninhabited world, and for an unbroken 
half day we tramped across a vast brown pampa, with only an occa- 
sional flock of sheep, the stone and straw kennels of shepherds at so 
great a distance off that I must trust as usual to luck in guessing 
aright among many faint paths, and at times even total absence thereof. 

The adobe-and-thatch Indian hamlet of Nahuinpuquio was en 
-fiesta, celebrating some church holiday. The air pulsated with the 
harsh and discordant noise of fife and drum, in the melancholy 
rhythm of all music of the aboriginals, and the drear landscape was 
brightened here and there by groups of dancers, Indians in fantastic 
costumes and ludicrous masks, who danced in fixed spots without 
moving a yard an hour in any direction. Over the valleyed and 
rocky face of the mountain beyond, a bit of the road consisted of 
rough-stone steps that may have been part of the old Inca highway. 
Then the trail pitched down into an ever warmer valley, the enclosing 
hillsides and rocky ranges marked off in hundreds of little stone- 
fenced patches, most of them newly plowed and waiting for rain. 
Toward sunset we came out suddenly above a river brilliant green 
with the patches of verdure stretching along it as far as the eye 
could command, — the Mantaro, racing Amazonward through its rock- 
hewn gorge, with villages tucked away here and there up the face of 
the great cliffs that rose ever higher as we wound forever downward 
round and round the headlands. 

347 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

In the parlor of the " Hacienda Casma," where shake-downs were 
prepared for three travelers whom chance had brought together in 
the half-tropical throat of the valley, lay piled the Huancayo-Huan- 
cavelica mail, — in virtually new American mail-sacks. The unusually 
noiseless sincerity of our host and the extraordinary order of his 
establishment surprised me not a little, until I learned that he was 
Argentine born. These rural haciendas take life easily. It was nearly 
eight next morning before we drifted together for coffee, bread, and 
cheese, and some time later that the mayordomo prevailed upon his 
Indian assistants to drive from the hacienda pasture a score of mules 
and horses, from which we each chose our animals. While I sat 
reading in the fresh, bird-singing, June morning, awaiting my four- 
footed companion, a travel-stained Indian slipped noiselessly into 
the yard with a letter which the wife of the hacendado opened and 
began to read. Her suppressed laughter soon drew the attention of 
her husband, who, having taken possession of the epistle, began in 
his turn to shake with mirth. When he had finished, he sent out of 
ear-shot the Indians who flocked in and about the corredor, and read 
the note to his guests. It was from the parish priest high up on the 
mighty range that shut in the river, and ran in part, all in a solemn, 
almost sanctimonious tone: 

" Yesterday, dear compadre, while on a round of confession among 
my scattered flock, to whom God grant all blessings, I found in the 

house of the widow a poor little orphan, newly born. Now I 

beg of you in the name of charity and the Holy Church to do me the 
inestimable service of acting as godfather to this unfortunate little 
innocent, that it may not be in danger of dying in mortal sin for 
want of baptism. We will ride there on Thursday. . . . Now I beg 
and pray ydu, dear compadre, to grant me this favor, and above all 
to say nothing whatever of this matter to anyone, since it is of no 
importance to any but ourselves, not even to mention it to your good 
and pious wife, whom God . . ." 

" But — " I began, somewhat at a loss to account for the roars 
of laughter that increased with each phrase. 

" Why, it 's — you see it 's — well, the padre knows the widow 
well, very well indeed," explained my host, wiping his eyes with a 
corner of his poncho, " and this is the fourth time since I became 
owner of Casma that he has asked me to be godfather to some poor 
little orphan he has found in different parts of his scattered parish. 
He is a man of force, is the padre. But of course he does n't want 

348 




A hint of what the second-class traveler on Peruvian railways must put up with — without 
the clashing of colors and the odors of pisco and chicha 




The wide main street and a part of the immense market of Huancayo. said to be the largest 

in Peru. The Indians, dressed in every shade of vivid colors and carrying 

every species of native product, trot in from a hundred 

miles around for this Sunday gathering 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

the good and pious sefioras of his flock to know about his little 
amusements. We Argentinos, however — well, who knows the secret 
of keeping a secret from a woman," he concluded, gazing after his 
wife as she hurried away, her shoulders still shaking. 

At the ancient and graceful arched bridge across the Mantaro, a 
half-day further down, I came to the parting of the ways. The 
direct trail to Ayacucho continued along the stony, winding river- 
bank to Tablachaca (Plank-bridge), but Huancavelica promised in- 
terest in proportion to its isolation, and I prevailed upon Chusquito to 
undertake the long, stiff climb up the face of the range under the ver- 
tical blazing sunshine. Little patches, inhabited since time imme- 
morial, stood out here and there, their green trees, flowers, and fruit- 
odors, in as sharp contrast to the grim mountain flanks as any oasis 
of the Sahara. Somewhat above the ancient town of Izcochaca, 
spilled up the hillside, rocks of a faint red or purple hue are dug out 
of the mountainside and tied in pairs on the backs of donkeys or 
llamas, scores of which we passed on their way to the great market 
of Huancayo. Even the inexperienced Andean traveler might easily 
have guessed what these stones were, from the habit of the donkeys of 
licking the burdens of their fellows at every halt. Salt is a government 
monopoly in Peru, and truly Peruvian in its condition. In the rural 
districts he who asks for salt is handed a stone — and a hammer with 
which to break it. Or in lieu of the latter he may beat two slabs of 
this mountainside rock together, and sprinkle. the resultant gravel on 
his food. It behooves the wise traveler to carry his own kodak-tin 
of civilized salt, for even in the larger towns this is often unattainable. 

All the afternoon we undulated across a lofty mountain-top, with a 
few human kennels of shepherds stuck on rock-ledges along the way, 
passing through one straw hamlet bright new in outward appearance, 
since threshing-time had but recently passed. In Huando, one of 
those dismal, rocky, comfortless, cold Indian towns that abound in 
the Sierra, I made my first acquaintance with alcaldes carrying silver- 
mounted staffs of office. His bedraggled wife, who was much more 
at home in Quichua than in Spanish, sent a messenger to announce 
my arrival to the gobernador. The latter was a quaint little man in 
side-burns, wearing the only even theoretically white collar in town, and 
a not too successful imitation of " European " garb that did not exactly 
set off to advantage his bashful rural dignity. There ensued that 
long, diplomatic parley by means of which the traveler at length 
wins hospitality — in rural Peru the word must be taken with a 

349 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

scanty meaning, since it commonly consists of permission to spread 
one's own trappings on the earth floor of the corredor. He who would 
be successful even in this must never state his wants abruptly, but only 
gradually drift toward them, without appearing to care particularly 
whether he be granted the permission or not. Ramon Lagos, how- 
ever, for all his childlike simplicity, knew the duty of a gobernador 
toward a distinguished traveler, even though he could not fathom my 
reason for coming on foot. By the time cold night was settling down 
he had sent an Indian to pile my possessions in the corredor, and in 
due season the most soapless of Indian girls arrived with a puchero, 
the Irish-stew of the Andes, containing the wing and drumstick of a 
guinea-pig, and carrying carefully on the end of a fork — no doubt 
after having stuck it there with her unmentionable fingers — another 
fat leg of the same squeaky rodent. Then there was ancient bread 
and weak willow-leaf tea, and a la postre my hostess came to share 
with me a delicacy she called " chicharron," — strips of hard-fried pork. 
Meanwhile, I had diplomatically put the gobernador in possession 
of ten cents, with which to buy fodder for Chusquito. A messenger 
went forth, and in due time an Indian algnacil on the down-grade of 
life appeared, bearing his barajo with all the dignity of an English 
beadle. Behind him came several youthful assistants, with less pre- 
tentious staffs of office. Though they are appointed by compulsion, 
these aids to the ruler of an Andean town are proud in their un- 
demonstative way of being thus raised above the common rabble. 
None of them would permit even the wife of the gobernador to take 
the black cane with silver bands out of his hands, and I could only 
admire them at a distance. Not one of the alguaciles spoke a word of 
Spanish. The gobernador in a Napoleonic voice gave the old man an 
order for two nickel's worth of straw. Apparently it was not etiquette 
for the younger aids of government to understand the command 
direct from the lips of the great gobernador himself. The chief 
alcalde bowed faintly and turned to stride away with an authorita- 
tive, if soft-footed tread. To carry out the order himself? No, in- 
deed ! Instead, he passed it on to one of the youths, whose badge of 
office was a much shorter staff, tied to his wrist, that it might not inter- 
fere with the actual and physical carrying out of the command. Some- 
what later one of these returned, struggling under a great bundle of 
straw, the old Indian strutting behind him, in all the dignity of his high 
authority still firmly grasping his barajo. After them came a girl, 
evidently the inferior of another of the authoritative youths, carrying 

350 \ 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

at least a peck of cebada, or barley. I sat late superintending the 
repast of my companion, for only the inexperienced Andean traveler 
will trust to native supervision of his animal's requirements. 

Not only do the Indian alcaldes and alguaciles hold office for the 
mere " honor " of the position, but the gobernadores themselves are 
appointed on compulsion and receive no reward, except from the 
traveler who, with great care not to give offense, chooses to make up 
for this governmental oversight. The news of my arrival had spread 
through the town, and in the morning the alguaciles had increased to a 
half-dozen, who sat motionless about the yard, staring like ruminat- 
ing oxen and accepting with leisurely avidity the crusts of my de- 
sayuno, handed them by the gobernador. That official, certain I could 
not find my way alone, had ordered a youth to accompany me. But 
as he was not overjoyed at the appointment, it was no hard matter to 
lose him in the bleak and gloomy labyrinthian town. 

An all-day tramp across an often laborious upland, brilliant for all 
its yellow-brown waste under the broad blue lift of the sky, raised a 
glacier-topped range, at the foot of which lies Huancavelica. The 
rolling uplands were alive now with llamas, alpacas, and sheep, graz- 
ing together as one family. Here was the " home " of the llama — 
which, by the way, is the Quichua term for domesticated animal — 
the only beast of burden known to the inhabitants of Peru before the 
coming of the Conquistadores, their only domestic animal, in fact, ex- 
cept the guinea-pig, unless we count the now exterminated alien. 
Relics of an ancient civilization in which they held chief place, the 
llama and the Indian of the Andes have much in common; they seem 
two branches of the same race who have fallen on evil days together, 
to plod through modern life like ghosts of a far-off past. Both 
endure only the high altitudes ; both are firmly wedded to their ances- 
tral home; both suffer uncomplainingly; both are temperamentally 
incapable of haste. The llama will not travel alone, but only in com- 
pany with its fellows; the Indian is a moderately effective workman 
in " bees " or bands, but lacks the self-reliance requisite to indi- 
vidual accomplishment. As the Indian squanders half his time in 
fiestas and celebrations, and breaks his labors frequently for a " coca- 
time," so the llama can work but twelve or fifteen days a month, 
spending the rest in feeding. The drivers — and only an Indian can 
drive them — are as soft- footed as the animals themselves, never 
shouting or urging them on with those cries common to all other 
arrieros. 

351 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

The llama, however, is more cleanly in his instincts than the In- 
dian ; does not rival him as a drunkard ; and, above all, retains a manly 
air, even under adversity, in striking contrast to the slinking manner 
of his human companion. He is the aristocrat among animals. 
Ever silent — if he has a bleat or cry, I have never heard it — his 
gentle, liquid eyes seem to look unseeing clear through one; he gazes 
upon the world about him with an expression of timorous disdain 
and the indifference of convinced superiority. His dignified attitude 
suggests a proud Inca set to carrying fire-wood, or a " decayed gentle- 
woman " refusing to be outwardly cast down by her misfortunes ; his 
air is dreamy, as if he were looking back to the time when he and the 
Incas reigned supreme over all the Andean plateau. Like an aristo- 
cratic prisoner on parole, all the security he requires is a rope laid 
across his neck, or a corral bordered round with stones a foot high. 
If the figure may be carried still further, there is yet another sugges- 
tion of the aristocrat in the fact that, beneath his haughty exterior, he 
is apt to be stupid, assuming his impressive dignity of manner to cover 
this interior paucity of matter. 

Had the llama been found in North America, he would have been 
exterminated even more completely than was the Indian. He is far 
too slow and ineffective a beast of burden to endure long against our 
national impatience. He carries barely a hundred pounds, and covers 
at best ten miles a day, grazing along the way, since he cannot feed 
by night. But in the leisurely southern continent he still survives on 
the high, cold plateaux that are his natural home, as the thin, hardy 
vegetation of paramos and punas is his natural food; and in this day 
of trains and automobiles, caravans of these frail, graceful creatures, 
their ears gaily decorated with bright ribbons, still glide across the 
frigid heights, as in the centuries when they represented the only 
freighters of an immense empire. 

Graceful when he walks, the llama runs with much the same awk- 
ward gait as the kangaroo, throwing his neck, and looking at a dis- 
tance like an ostrich on four legs. In the region round about us were 
grazing, also, many alpacas — here called pacos — a far uglier ani- 
mal in its thick wool of many colors, from black to gray, than the 
gracefully formed and generally white llama. He is suggestive of a 
shaggy, spring bear, and though he, too, occasionally serves as a beast 
of burden, his chief value is in his wool. Two other members of the 
same Andean family, the guanaco and the vicuna, found chiefly in the 
wilder regions further south, are never domesticated. The latter, 

3$2 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

graceful and delicate as a fawn, produces the most valuable wool to 
be found in the Western Hemisphere. 

A native horseman, or, more exactly, muleman, had fallen in with 
us, after striving for hours to overtake us. We rose and fell two or 
three times more over rocky ridges, then came out suddenly on the 
brow of a tremendous ravine above Huancavelica, in a situation ex- 
traordinary even in comparison with the many striking ones throughout 
the Andes. Grim, almost perpendicular mountains, their jagged sum- 
mits of rock like decaying fangs, lay piled into the sky on every hand, 
and completely boxed in a vega, or little, flat plain, in the center of 
which, close at hand, yet far below us, every patio of the city lay as 
plainly in sight as the unroofed houses of Paris under the gaze of 
" Diable Boiteu." The trail pitched so steeply downward that the 
native was forced to dismount and lead his mule. 

" You see," he boasted, pointing to several iron crosses on almost 
inaccessible crags high above the city, " this is a Christian " (by which 
he meant Catholic) country." 

The retort suggested itself that there were other and even less 
pleasant proofs of that fact, but there would have been no gain in 
talking plainly to one of his low mental caliber. The Latin-American 
can always build crosses along his roads, even if he cannot build the 
roads themselves. Our thighs ached from the swift descent long be- 
fore we passed through the suburb of San Cristobal, separated from the 
town proper by the crystal-clear little mountain river, Ichu, and we 
had all but encircled the department capital before an ancient bridge of 
mamposteria, a mixture of mud, stones, and plaster, at last gave us 
admittance. 

Rare is the traveler of to-day who passes through Huancavelica. 
As I climbed the slippery, squeaky, small-cobbled streets toward the 
central plaza, I was quickly reminded that I was far from the haunts 
of civilized man, in an isolated world where even the sight of a strange 
face is a rare treat, to say nothing of a foreigner in shirt-sleeves, 
armed with a revolver and a sheath-knife, struggling to drag with him 
a diminutive, shaggy mountain pony laden with miscellaneous junk. 
For Chusquito, bewildered by the surroundings of an unknown city, 
displayed an excitement and a waywardness of which I had not sus- 
pected him capable. As I entered the cobbled and grassy plaza, across 
which the towering western mountain-wall was already throwing its 
cold evening shadow, the chiefly Indian soldiers on guard before the 
Prefectura stared with bulging eyes, and rubbed their hands across 

353 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

their brows, as if wondering whether they saw aright and whether they 
should do anything about it. The adjoining streets were long lines of 
gaping faces, each new group falling suddenly silent as they caught 
sight of the unexpected apparition that had descended unheralded upon 
them, and the at best slight industry and energy of Huancavelica 
came completely to a standstill. 

I was supplied with no fewer than six letters of introduction. The 
Prefectura was officially closed, which made one useless. I dragged 
Chusquito into the patio of Dr. Duran next door, and announced 
myself possessor of a recommendation to the lawyer from his best 
friend in Lima. He acted like a Peruvian. Not merely did he de- 
cline to step out of his office, but sent an Indian boy to demand the 
letter. When I presented myself in the doorway instead, he read it 
with fear plainly depicted on his features that he might be obliged 
to offer hospitality to a man who could not be a caballero, since he came 
on foot, and as plainly sought some loophole to avoid that necessity. 
He found one, too, when he turned again to the envelope. The writer 
had carelessly written the first name and, though he had explained 
the error, had not taken the trouble to change it. 

" Ah, but this letter is not for me," cried the lawyer triumphantly, 
" it is addressed to Felipe, and I am Enrique " — though he knew as 
well as I that there was not another Dr. Duran in all Huancavelica. 

The open-mouthed throng that had massed about the zaguan led 
me en masse to a building that had once been a hotel on the further 
corner of the plaza. It was too much to expect the inhabitants to know 
already that it had ceased its ministrations to transients — the pro- 
prietor had been barely four years dead. The whispering chorus about 
me swelled gradually to the audible assertion that there was another 
establishment a few squares away which " sometimes had given accomo- 
dations to estranjeros." At that moment a soldier, bearing a naked 
sword in one hand and a musket in the other, came running to say that 
the ayudante wished to know who I was, why, where, whence, and all 
the rest of it, — and that I was to report to him at once. I comman- 
deered the messenger to lead me to the rumored hostelry. Before we 
reached it, however, a boy shouted to a shopkeeper, leaning out over 
his half-door to watch the unwonted excitement, that — a fact I had 
chanced to mention to some one, whereupon it instantly became general 
knowledge — I had a letter for Solomon Atala. The " Turk," for 
such he was, dashed into the crowd and announced himself the 
addressee. 

354 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

" Very well ; you will come and live at my house," he cried, when he 
had perused the note. 

I protested that a public hostelry in the Andes was too rare a luxury 
to be lightly given up, and that it was bad enough to intrude upon pri- 
vate families when there was no other alternative. The " Turk " would 
not hear any such argument. I had been recommended by his good 
friend, and I belonged to him as long as I chose to remain in Huan- 
cavelica. Memories of Palestine reminded me that to men of his race 
hospitality has none of the hollow nothingness common to Peru. 
While we stood talking, a boy surreptitiously led Chusquito off down a 
gaping side-street to the " Turk's " home, and I had perforce to follow. 
My possessions disappeared through a narrow door within a door, once 
through which I found myself in the littered patio of an ancient house 
of ample, rambling proportions. A female voice bade me mount a cen- 
tury-worn stairway to a sagging second-story balcony completely sur- 
rounding the yard. Barely had I dubiously set foot upon it than there 
popped out several slatternly women and the mightiest swarm of un- 
assorted children I had ever yet seen in captivity. My imagination 
began to picture what sleeping, and writing notes, and getting the few 
days' rest to which I was entitled, would be in that swarming house- 
hold, and unable to think of any ceremonial excuse, I slipped down the 
aged stairs, untied Chusquito, and dragged him away up the slippery 
cobbled street. 

The worst of it was that I had to pass the " Turk's " shop again to 
reach the hotel. The good fellow was just locking up to come home 
and entertain me, and he pounced upon me at once, quite literally, 
throwing his arms about me and attempting to drag me off bodily, 
while Huancavelica stared open-mouthed upon us from every door- 
way. But I had set my heart on the repose of a room of my own. 
Beating off the affectionate " Turk " with one hand, and struggling in 
vain to keep Chusquito off the sidewalk and out of each succeeding 
shop with the other, I gradually worked my way forward, leaving my 
would-be host on the verge of tears, and gained at last the " Saenz- 
Pena Hotel." It was a dislocated little building of long, long, ago, 
wrapped like a carelessly flung garment around a tiny patio, its most 
conspicuous feature the city billiard-room in which a half-dozen youths 
of sporting proclivities were gathered — at least, until they caught sight 
of us. Summoned from the mysterious interior, the respectful and 
astonished poncho-clad proprietor went in quest of a key, and un- 
locked the padlock of one of three small doors tucked away in as many 

355 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

corners of the patio — doors made of battered drygoods boxes with the 
lettering still upon them, so precious is lumber in these treeless heights 
— explaining that the other two rooms were " ocupados " — perhaps 
with empty bottles or guinea-pigs, certainly not with guests. 

The chamber assigned me awoke my gratitude. It was, to be sure, 
so small that I could touch both walls at once, windowless and doorless, 
except for the narrow opening by which I squeezed in, gloomy and 
chill, after the fashion of adobe mountain rooms long closed ; but it was 
furnished, even to a bed with real springs. Barely had I carried my 
traps inside, when there burst into the patio another " Turk," who as- 
serted in gestureful Spanish that he was the real Solomon Atala to 
whom I belonged during my stay in Huancavelica, the other being 
merely his brother, who had opened the letter in the brotherly way of 
Palestinians. He, too, was a believer in forcible hospitality, and the 
hotel proprietor looked on in helpless dismay at what promised to be a 
successful attempt to carry off his only guest in — the patron saint of 
hoteleros knows how long. A bed with springs, in a room by myself, 
however, was not a luxury to be given up for the mere danger of mak- 
ing a few Turkish enemies, and in the end the engaging Syrian, seeing 
no way out of it, admitted with bad grace that, as I already had my 
possessions scattered about the hotel room, it would be unfair to 
the proprietor not to retain it. I should remain where I was until 
morning, when we would talk the matter over. He agreed under pro- 
test, and at length gloomily took his departure. 

This " friend in town " is the bugbear of hotel-keepers, or would-be 
keepers, in the Andes. The Arabian notion of hospitality, inherited 
from the Moors and mixed perhaps with the traditions of Inca days, 
with their free and public tambos along all the highways of the empire, 
still holds sway, at least superficially. The Peruvian will all his life 
put up with begging lodging, food, and fodder on his travels, often 
going without them entirely, rather than help support a hotel, con- 
sidering it a sign of high rank to be housed by an outwardly delighted 
acquaintance, and thus cheat the struggling hotelero out of a livelihood. 

Having led Chusquito to the river to drink and heaped before him 
half of a five-cent bundle of alcazer — green barley, for grain does not 
ripen at this altitude — and locked the rest inside my chamber, I stalked 
in solitary grandeur through the gaping billiard-players to the dining- 
room, and sat down at the end of a long oil-clothed table near a small 
opening in the wall that looked like an enlarged rat-hole. The poncho- 
clad proprietor proceeded with fitting gravity to serve me a thoroughly 

356 



o o 
c 5 





OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

Peruvian meal, of which the chief ingredient was a churrasco, or steak, 
not of beef, as I at first fancied, but of llama, a favorite Huancavelican 
dish which would not exactly win the unstinted praise of an epicure. 
Between each course he repaired to the kitchen in a corner of the barn- 
yard to poke the various dishes through the hole in the wall, and then 
reappeared within to serve them. It may have been a long time since 
he had been honored with a guest, but he had not forgotten the proper 
form of service. After each trip he balanced on alternate legs, staring 
at me silently, until at last his tongue refused longer to obey his will, 
when he burst out tremulously :. 

" Uste' — ah — sefior, es andarin, no ? " 

" Not at all," I replied, to his patent disappointment. " You see I 
have n't a single medal on my chest." 

"Ah, then you travel to sell something; jewelry perhaps, like all 
f ranceses ? " 

Squier, traveling through the Andes a half-century ago, found that 
" in the Sierra all foreigners are supposed to be French in nationality 
and peddlers of jewelry by profession," and conditions have changed 
little to this day. The landlord-waiter was openly incredulous of my 
second denial, but once the sluice-gates of his curiosity had been opened, 
the flow of words swamped even the service, and the soup had long 
since become a memory of the dim past before he poked the pastre of 
melted panela through to himself. I made my escape at last, and went 
to sit on the wooden sofa in the billiard-room, as the only place in town 
with light enough to see oneself by ; but my distinguished presence was 
so evidently the cause of bad shots that gradually turned the players 
bitterly resentful, and the atmosphere was so decidedly wintry, that I 
soon " hit the hay " — quite literally, for such proved to be the filling of 
the outwardly luxurious-looking mattress. 

I had barely ventured into the street next morning when I was 
dragged into the shop of the two Palestinians. After a bitter and 
noisy struggle we patched up a truce as follows : Since I was already 
enstalled there, I was to keep my room at the hotel, but it was at their 
house that I must take breakfast and dinner. . . . 

" And desayuno ! " cried the " Turks " as one man, " You must also 
come and take breakfast with us. If you like eggs, or steak, or pickled 
pigs' feet, or . . . Very well, even if you take only coffee and bread, 
like a Peruvian. . . ." 

Though it was barely ten of a brilliant Sunday morning, the 
Andean merchant's richest hour, they shut up shop, in spite of the mild 

357 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

protests of a dozen ponchoed shoppers, and led the way to their ram- 
bling residence. A meal heavy with meat was enlivened with an ex- 
cellent wine that could have cost little less than a small fortune at this 
altitude. The manners of the household recalled Palestine. We 
three men sat at table with our hats on, in Arabic as well as Andean 
fashion, while the women hovered more or less inconspicuously in the 
background. A dozen small children of both sexes crawled and 
climbed and sprawled and displayed their plump, unwashed nakedness 
on, around, and under the table, drinking wine and swearing like 
arrieros in both Spanish and Quichua. They were being brought up 
in the Palestinian, which is to some extent the Latin-American, fashion 
that forbade coercion, and were heartily laughed at and dubbed " cute " 
whenever they did anything particularly naughty or disobedient. 

The two Syrians, as we would call them, or " Turks," as their fel- 
low-countrymen are known through all South America, had left Beth- 
lehem some eight years before. They announced themselves " Chris- 
tians," which meant merely that they were not Mohammedans ; though, 
as behooves ambitious merchants, they diplomatically avoided any re- 
ligious controversy with their clients. For several years they had ped- 
dled on foot over all the accessible portion of central Peru, descending 
even into the montafia, or great hot lands to the east, the abode of rub- 
ber, fever, and " wild " Indians. Bit by bit they had established shops 
in various towns, until they had come to be among the most important 
merchants of the region, with headquarters in Huancavelica and 
branches in charge of more youthful fellow-countrymen in the chief 
centers of population of the department. Their success was typical of 
thousands of men of their race throughout the southern continent. For 
the native, equally scanty of initiative, industry, and the inclination to 
risk his capital, is at best an ineffective competitor of this tireless race 
of born shopkeepers. Of productive labor, great as is the call for it in 
this backward Andean land, the " Turk " brings nothing. Nor is his 
example likely to better the personal habits of the native population, 
though it may breed more effective " business methods," and even a 
higher grade of commercial honesty — to .say nothing of hospitality. 
It is not by such immigration, however, that the dormant continent will 
be rejuvenated. 

My irrepressible hosts cherished a hazy dream of some day return- 
ing to Palestine with their fortune. Yet their children spoke not a 
word of the Arabic that still served for most of the intercourse between 
the men and their slatternly wives. The brothers themselves were 

358 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

fluent, not only in Spanish, but in Quichua. The throaty dialect of the 
aboriginals has much in common with the no less guttural Arabic; as 
the similarity of customs and point of view makes the race particularly 
adaptable to Peruvian surroundings. No other foreigner fits better 
into the life of the Andes, and it is not strange that the Syrian has 
most effectively invaded Andean commerce. Even the Chinaman, who 
quickly disappears as the traveler turns his back on Lima, has found it 
impossible to compete with these more western Orientals. 

It is unfortunate that the traveler given to reporting his wanderings 
cannot have his mind erased every little while, like a slate; for so 
quickly do the sights and sounds of a strange country sink to the com- 
monplace that many things that might delight the stay-at-home pass 
unnoticed. Thus an American untouched with the contempt of fa- 
miliarity, suddenly set down in Huancavelica, would no doubt find it 
abounding with " local color." Hays, who journeyed overland to 
Cuzco some months before me, enthusiastically proclaimed it " the most 
picturesque town in South America." But to one who had followed 
the Andes step by step it was rather monotonously like any other town 
of the Sierra, its customs varying only in a few minor details from 
those that had long since grown familiar. By night it lies silent and 
dead under its cold stars. Dawn finds the fountain in its central 
" Plaza de la Independencia " bearded with icicles, and no clock or 
sun-dial could give the hour more exactly than the regularity with 
which these drip away to nothing in the late morning. For the sun 
falls tardily on Huancavelica, having first to climb the mountain ram- 
part that shuts it in on the east. The town wisely remains in bed 
until the god of the Incas has asserted his brilliant, undisputed sway, 
and my road-habit of rising at daybreak gave me the sensation of 
strolling through a city from which the entire populace had fled. In- 
deed, the only really comfortable place in town was in bed. All day 
long one shivered in the shade or burned in the sun. In my dank, 
dungeon cell it was distinctly too dark, cold, and gloomy to read or 
write; on the red benches of the plaza the glare of the molten disk 
above was too brilliant to endure, even when some unsophisticated old 
native did not join me and remain deaf to all hints that even a traveler 
has his work to do. I soon formed the habit of taking daily possession 
of the ancient band-stand facing the white " cathedral." Here was a 
bench on which I could, by constant manipulation, keep myself in the 
sun and my note-book in the shade; and as it was apparently against 
the rules or contrary to costumbre for a native to occupy the struc- 

359 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

ture, I sat here hour after hour in solitary glory, flanked by the four 
staring sides of the plaza. The activity of an Andean town can gen- 
erally be gaged by its plaza, and by that token Huancavelica was in- 
active indeed. Evidently no industry more important than a soup- 
kettle could be run by natives, and foreigners were rare. Charcoal 
braziers, or the three-stone, fagot-fires at the backs of huts, where 
crouched old women almost too feeble to drive off the curs that 
swarmed around the steaming earthen calabashes, represented the 
ordinary cooking processes, the fires being now and then given new 
life with a bamboo, or woven-weed fan. So bucolic was the populace 
that every stroll through the streets brought a score of inquiries as 
to what I was selling, many regarding even my kodak as a sale-kit 
and inviting me to enter, while children and grown-ups alike hastened 
to summon the rest of the family as often as I hove in sight. 

In common with all Latins, the people are lovers of perpetual noise, 
and have no conception of our Anglo-Saxon desire to be occasionally 
let alone. Though the annoyances were always innocent, rather than 
intentional, I could not pause for a moment that I did not have a sur- 
rounding mob, and there was almost constantly a procession of boys, 
and even those old enough to know better, at my heels. If I paused 
to look at an old carved corner-stone or an ancient balcony, necks were 
craned in wonder as to what on earth an estranjero from the great 
outside world could find of interest in the lifelong sights of their 
drowsy capital. Yet there was a peculiar repose and quiet about the 
place, as if it were literally shut off by its grim mountain-walls from 
all the troubles of the great world. Shopkeepers locked up and went 
home to play or sleep whenever the whim struck them. Though a de- 
partment capital, there ^vas not a physician in town, nor any open evi- 
dence of a drug-store; and while there was no doubt some advantage 
in this state of affairs, the death-rate from dysentery and pneumonia 
was high. An awkward, slow-minded, mountain people, they had not 
even the usual mountaineer virtue of shyness, being as forward in 
their manner as Hebrews. I was never out of sight of at least one 
" authority," a ragged Indian from some neighboring hamlet up among 
the higher ranges, clinging jealously to his black silver-mounted cane 
of office. Pacos and llamas could be made out, tiny as mice, feeding 
on the perpendicular crags sheer above the town, among the abrupt 
splintered masses of rock that cut all the surrounding sky-line sharply 
with their jagged crests. 

As I was strolling about town the day after my arrival, a soldier 

360 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

again came running after me to say that the prefect himself desired 
me to report and explain myself. I handed the menial my card, and 
heard no more of the matter. The printed name on a bit of cardboard 
is proof sufficient of aristocracy in most of South America. Burglars 
and highwaymen contemplating entrance into that field of activities 
would do well to provide themselves with a plentiful supply of visiting 
cards, the larger and more imposing the better. Later on, when I 
called on the department ruler at my own volition and with the dignity 
befitting an envoy from the outside world, a man was assigned to 
attend me on any excursions I chose to make in or about the town. 

The origin of the name of Huancavelica is curious. There was, it 
seems, no town here at the time of the Conquest. To the Incas this 
flat enclosed plain with its clear little river offered too fine an oppor- 
tunity for their enemies to roll rocks down upon them from the tower- 
ing heights above. Centuries ago there settled on the spot an Indian 
of the Huanca tribe, inhabiting the great valley between Jauja and 
Huancayo. He died young, and for long years his wife dwelt alone 
in the only hut in this capacious mountain-pocket. Her name was 
Isabel, which in South America becomes familiarly or affectionately, 
" Velica." Her hut was a sort of tambo, where a bit of corn or eggs 
might occasionally be had, or at least pasture for pack-animals and 
shelter from the paramo winds. Hence travelers through the region, 
asked where they would spend the night, announced : " Voy llegar 
donde la Huanca Velica." 

Then it was discovered that the grim, treeless mountains piled into 
the sky about the little valley were rich in quicksilver, and a mining 
town built itself up about the hut of Isabel, the Huanca. For centu- 
ries the great Santa Barbara mine high above the town, and several 
smaller workings in the vicinity, yielded the mercury used in Potosi 
and in all the mines of Peru, High or Low, which was brought from 
Huancavelica on the backs of llamas. Then, as more scientific methods 
came into vogue, the miners turned to California for their supply, until 
to-day the Mercury Queen is but an echo of her former greatness, and 
the open shafts of her cinnibar mines, which rumor has it left several 
of the surrounding ranges great hollow caverns, stand silent and de- 
serted. It is this failure to keep up with modern times that has left 
Huancavelica one of the most " picturesque " department capitals, with 
poverty her chief handmaid. Lack of transportation is her principal 
drawback. The very town itself is said to sit on top of great deposits 
of quicksilver. Workmen, digging for the foundation of a new build- 

361 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

ing on a corner of the plaza during my sojourn, found pure-liquid 
mercury bubbling up out of the ground. Modern miners, however, 
refuse to operate where only the slow and unreliable llama must be 
depended on for transportation, and only when the long-promised 
railroad arrives, will Huancavelica come into her own again. 

The chief point of interest was the famous old mercury mine of 
Santa Barbara. Strangely enough, the cicerone appeared within an 
hour of the daylight time set, though without breakfast, and shared 
with me the results of my own rum-burning handicraft. A round- 
about, but exceedingly steep road, on which we panted audibly in spite 
of frequent halts for breath, brought us to our goal far above the town. 
Near a silent, cold, Indian hamlet, with an aged Spanish church facing 
its dreary plaza, was the ruin of a cut-stone smelting-works of colonial 
days, and behind it the 'imposing arched entrance to the enormous 
caverns said to undermine all the neighboring range. Above this was a 
large Spanish coat-of-arms cut in stone, with the information that the 
arch had been constructed by General Fulano in 1707 ; and the weather- 
defaced relief of a saint holding a child. The silence of long aban- 
donment brooded over all the scene. We lighted the medieval oil-lamp 
borrowed from the hotel, and disappeared within. The tunnel that led 
straight into the mountainside was large enough, if not for a railway 
train, at least for a horseman to have ridden in comfortably, its floor 
easily as good a road as the average Peruvian one outside. Here and 
there we crawled over a heap of stones and earth where a part of the 
wall had fallen, and at 382 paces from the mouth were halted by a 
cave-in that had choked up the entire tunnel. My companion had 
assured me that the spirits of ancient Spaniards and their Indian vic- 
tims, lying in wait for unwary moderns, made our entrance perilous 
in the extreme, and, once permission was given, lost no time in retreat- 
ing. 

From the exit we went faldeando (skirting) the mountain to the an- 
cient mining village of Chaclatacana, about which, and scattered over 
all the vicinity, were the evidences of little mines the Indians had dug 
on their own account. The cinebrio deposits of the region were first 
disclosed to the Spaniards in 1566, by the custom of the aboriginals of 
painting their faces with it. My guide asserted that condors were 
numerous, and often dangerous to the eyes of men wandering over 
these lofty heights ; but it was my luck not to catch sight of one of those 
giant birds of the Andes. I was rewarded, however, for taking the 
" short-cut " that proved longer and more laborious than the road, by a 

362 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

bird's eye view of Huancavelica, so directly below us that we could 
have tossed our hats into the central plaza. Here, too, among the split 
and jagged rock-crags we stumbled upon a colony of viscachas, — 
" biscachos " my companion called them — almost the only quadruped, 
besides the guinea-pig and the llama family, indigenous to the Peru- 
vian highlands. The creature is sometimes dubbed the " squirrel of 
the Andes," but its size was more nearly that of the rabbit, its prominent 
tail and means of locomotion suggestive of some diminutive species of 
the kangaroo, its color not unlike that of our prairie dog, which it re- 
sembled somewhat also in its manner of dodging in and out among the 
rocks and crags, as if inviting us to a game of " hide and seek." Ac- 
cording to my attendant, the meat of the animal is even more succu- 
lent than llama-flesh, providing the tail is cut off at the moment of 
killing. 

But for the unkindness of fate there would have been a gala bull- 
fight in Huancavelica on the Sunday of my stay. The one negro I 
had seen shivering about town turned out to be a torero, imported — 
chiefly at his own expense — from Lima for the occasion. The corral 
behind the rambling dwelling of my hosts had been turned into a 
" ring," a square one, to be sure, laboriously fenced with poles tied 
with bark and cords to upright stakes. But on Saturday afternoon, 
just as the town was rubbing its hands together at the prospect of a 
half-forgotten entertainment, the one bull that was to have furnished 
it sprang through the barrier and over the low wall to the sunken 
,street below, fifteen feet if it was an inch, and instead of dying on the 
spot, was last seen making record time for his mountain pasture. 

The irrepressible " Turks " were wellnigh obnoxious in their hos- 
pitality. The most baggage-abhoring of travelers acquires gradually 
and unconsciously a new point of view with respect to his pack when 
he is no longer forced to burden his own shoulders with it, and articles 
that have hitherto seemed only useless weight take on the aspect of 
necessities. But after they had " sold " me an enamel cup and a roll 
of cotton-flannel for " Fusslappen," the Syrians refused vociferously to 
accept payment. When I caught sight of a mouth-organ that might 
have served to while away the tramp across the lonely uninhabited 
world ahead, my mere glance at it caused Jose to drop it into my 
pocket when I was off my guard. A wordy battle ended with his ac- 
ceptance of a sol, which he swore was the wholesale price of an instru- 
ment marked to retail for five times that amount ; but it cost me eternal 
vigilance to keep now one, now the other brother from surreptitiously 

363 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

returning the coin. There was nothing left but to curtail my pur- 
chases. To choose from their stock was to have charity thrust upon 
me; to buy of their rivals would have been the height of insults, and 
would quickly have published to all the town their lack of hospitality, or 
my ingratitude. My last day with them the firm of Atala Hermanos 
spent in writing me letters of introduction to all their countrymen from 
Huancavelica to Cape Horn, and when I sneaked into their patio at 
dawn next morning, bent on abducting Chusquito unseen, the entire 
household was already waiting to drag me in to an extraordinary 
breakfast. Not satisfied with that, they forced upon me a boiled leg- 
of-mutton and several other delicacies, among them a dozen raw eggs 
which, tied in a handkerchief on Chusquito's back, broke one by one 
with his jolting gait and ran in yellow streams down the rubber poncho 
that covered the pack. 

All Huancavelica united in attempting to force a guide upon me, 
asserting that even " hijos del lugar " frequently lost themselves on the 
trackless puna beyond. I smiled indulgently at what had long since 
become a threadbare prophesy, but had occasion to recall it before 
the day was done. The way mounted steadily all the morning, un- 
covering a vast yellow-brown world that stretched forever before me. 
In the early hours it was scantily inhabited by wild, weather-faded 
shepherds watching over flocks of llamas, pacos, or sheep, and leisurely 
busy turning wool into yarn on their crude spindles, an occupation that 
gave the men a curiously effeminate air, out of all keeping with their 
rough exterior. These chary fellows took good care that we should 
not come within shouting distance of them, and even the rare travelers 
and llama drivers made wide circuits to avoid us, as if fearful of their 
defenselessness on this bleak, shelterless top of the world. If taken 
unaware in some fold of the earth, they muttered some stupidity in 
the Quichua slang dialect of the region, and sped away like startled 
hares. Unable to make inquiries, I could only trust to chance, com- 
pass, and the instinct that develops with long Andean travel. For on 
these broad mountain-tops the traveler is by no means master of the 
situation, and to guess wrong between several at best faintly marked 
paths may be to go hopelessly astray, and come out on the opposite side 
of the Andes from that toward which one is headed. For long stretches 
the dreary paramo showed no sign whatever of travel, though here 
and there the droppings of llamas gave the route a more or less fixed 
direction. A jolly, coca-chewing old Indian, whom I came upon in 
the afternoon plodding patiently behind his haughty train, had seen 

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OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

enough of the world to have lost some of his fear of white men and 
assured me I was still on the right road. But he must have been mis- 
taken, or else I guessed wrong at the next opportunity, for the bit of 
trail that had grown up under my feet split irreconcilably and left, at 
the hour when I should have come upon an hacienda reputed hospitable 
to travelers, only the rolling, trackless, yellow puna stretching away on 
every hand. 

A raging thunder-storm of rain and hail, under which the vast land 
and skyscape turned dark as night, soon broke upon us. I had strug- 
gled a long distance through the storm, when I faintly made out a 
little cluster of huts some distance to the right in a wrinkle of the 
pampa. After I had overcome my own disinclination to go out of my 
way to seek lodging, there was needed a laborious argument to bring 
my companion to my way of thinking. For Chusquito would have 
none of your side trips. The truth is I had been somewhat deceived 
and disappointed in the disposition of my chosen fellow-adventurer. 
As long as the road lay straight and undoubtedly before us, he was an 
ideal companion, never breaking the thread of my reflections by calling 
attention to the scenery, nor otherwise making himself humanly ob- 
noxious. But in temperament he might best be likened to a cat, ac- 
cepting all favors and friendly overtures with a complacent aloofness 
and matter-of-course manner that resembled ingratitude, refusing to be 
won over, even by carresses, to the faintest expression of a reciprocal 
affection. Moreover, he had a will, not to say a wilfulness, of his own 
that is enimical to all genuine companionship on the road, and a respect 
for costumbre that betrayed his Latin-American training. I felt no 
compunction in having recourse to brute force in a dispute under such 
circumstances as then faced us, however, and we soon gained the only 
visible shelter. 

On a cold, cheerless spot, almost devoid of even the vegetation of 
high pampas, I found five miserable human kennels of loosely laid 
stones and ichu grass, in charge of several gaunt, savage, yet cowardly 
curs, and an Indian boy speaking only monosyllabic Quichua. All the 
huts, except a beehive-shaped structure that served as kitchen, had 
huge native padlocks on the doors. Choked with thirst, in tantalizing 
contrast to my dripping garments and the raging storm, I called for 
water. 

" Manam cancha," murmured the boy dully, using the Quichua ver- 
sion of that stereotyped Andean falsehood, " There is none." 

" Yacu ! " I shouted, jokingly laying a hand on my revolver. 

365 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

He slunk away, and picked up a battered cup behind one of the huts. 
Wiping this on his lifelong sleeve, he scraped the bottom of a huge 
earthen jar that leaned awry, in what would have needed only a fence 
to be a barnyard, at an angle that enabled the dogs to help themselves at 
the same source, and presented the half-filled vessel to me. There was 
no second choice in the matter, for this region, untold miles above sea- 
level, had no other supply of water than the rain that chanced to drop 
into the leaning cantaros. Fortunately the taste bore little evidence of 
what the appearance suggested. I made a round of the huts, resolved 
to spend the night there, even if I had to break into one of the build- 
ings. 

" Huasi-munuy ! " I cried, patching my Quichua together after my 
own fashion, and pointing to one of the padlocks. 

" Manam cancha," repeated the huarma in the same dull monotone. 
I held out what would have seemed a fortune of small coins to a coun- 
try boy of other lands, but he shook his head doggedly, without a gleam 
of interest, casting a half-frightened glance at my weapon. An older 
youth, who had appeared noiselessly from somewhere, treated the offer 
of money with the same indifference and settled down to a silent at- 
tempt to drive me off, in spite of the storm and the night that was 
closing in. It was then that I thought of the sack I had filled in the 
market of Huancayo. At the magic word " coca " the pair awoke 
to a new interest in life. Each snatched off his hat to receive a handful 
of leaves, mumbling a " Gracias, tayta-tayta," and the older youth 
ordered the other to clear away a miscellaneous assortment of junk, 
bundles of old sheepskins, and a heap of llama-droppings gathered for 
fuel, from one end of the hut " porch " under the edge of which I was 
seated. As he worked, there fell from somewhere under the projecting 
eaves the corpse of a tiny, black pig that had quite evidently died a 
natural death, but which the family just as evidently proposed to eat, 
for the boy carried it off to a safer spot, plainly doubting my honesty. 
In a corner lay two bundles of ichu grass. I tossed one to Chusquito, 
standing dejected and disgusted beside me, and spread out the other 
as a mattress. The youth made no protest, but shook his head at the 
real I offered in payment. A howling wind that even the stone hut 
failed to break made it useless to attempt to set up my cooking outfit. 
As I drew cold food from my pack, the Indians sat motionless as stone 
statues, but watched with keen eyes, monkey-like, my every move. I 
shared the lunch with them, though I should much have preferred 
paying them in money for their dubious hospitality. It is one of the 

366 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

drawbacks of Andean journeying that the traveler is expected to 
share his scanty supplies, not merely with his human companions of 
the moment, but is invariably surrounded under such circumstances 
by a ravenous swarm of begging and thieving dogs, pigs, and fowls. 
Except for a score of llamas lying in patrician aloofness beyond the 
huts, every living creature crowded round to appeal to my generosity 
or to catch me off my guard. The Indians accepted each morsel with 
a murmured " Gracias " that plainly proceeded from custom rather than 
from any real thankfulness. Innumerable experiments, from the Rio 
Grande southward, had demonstrated that the American aboriginal has 
not a trace of gratitude in his make-up ; indeed, the use of the Spanish 
term suggests that the native language did not even include a word for 
thanks. 

The thirst that follows an all-day tramp outlived the available supply 
of water, and even the bottle of pisco I dared not bring to light until 
darkness had concealed my movements from the Indians could not be 
shared with Chusquito, no doubt choking within, in spite of his bedrag- 
gled, dripping flanks. As the storm died down, the evening spread 
wonderful colors across this bleak upper world, bringing out in lilac 
tints, shading to purple and then to black, the saw-toothed range bound- 
ing the horizon on the far south. The night would have been bitter 
cold even inside one of the huts, to say nothing of lying on the earth 
floor of the open, mud corredor. Yet the cold which my rubber poncho 
kept out was no less surprising than the heat which the wooly llama- 
hair one kept in, and my sleep might easily have been much more 
broken than it was. 

During my first doze there arrived an old Indian, evidently the head 
of the household that had hitherto kept itself successfully concealed. 
He was somewhat the worse for fiery waters and, being apprized of his 
visitor, set up a deal of howling and shouting in Quichua. Receiv- 
ing no answer, he ventured to take a mild poke at me with his stick. It 
would have been heroic indeed to have gotten out of " bed." Instead, 
I turned loose a string of American and Spanish words of high voltage 
which experience had shown to have a withering effect on his race. 
Though he did not understand them individually, he evidently grasped 
their general import, for he subsided at once, and retired to the bee- 
hive kitchen, where for a long time he howled and yelped, as brave men 
will in the midst of their trembling and admiring families. Bit by bit 
his women pacified him, in the way women have, perhaps with more 
pisco and coca, for I heard him laugh several times thereafter, with a 

367 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

sound like that of a choking cow, before anything resembling silence 
settled down over the lofty mountain-top world. Real silence is rare 
in these Indian huts at night. Either the lack of comfort they are too 
lazy or uninitiative to remedy, or the chewing of coca keeps the miser- 
able inhabitants half-awake, and periods of growling and grumbling 
are seldom far apart from dark to dawn. 

I fancy it was midnight, more or less, when I became drowsily aware 
that Chusquito, tied within a foot of my head, was munching some 
fodder I knew he did not possess; but I was too nearly asleep to rise 
and investigate. The moon testified that it was some two hours later 
when I was awakened to find the head of the household standing beside 
me, his hand on a damaged roof and bellowing a guttural stream 
in which I caught several times the words " Huasi micuni — eating my 
house." This would be an impoliteness in any land, and I bravely 
forced myself to slip into my brogans and out into the icy moonlight. 
Chusquito had scalloped out the bangs of the grass roof in a new style 
that, to my notion, was more fetching than the original. If only the 
Indians of the Andes were not so stonily conservative, my host would 
have thanked me for the improvement, instead of sputtering with rage. 
I tied the innocent culprit to a stone-wall nearby, which was also an 
unfortunate choice, for I heard him knock down most of that in the 
hours that remained before daylight. During the long uproar that 
ensued in the kitchen, no doubt the old Indian told his family many 
times over that had he been at home when I arrived, I should not have 
remained ; but in that he was mistaken, for it would have taken a con- 
siderable band of South American Indians to have denied me hospi- 
tality. I lay down again with my revolver and cartridge-belt handy 
under the edge of the ponchos; not that there was any danger, but 
because I do not care to be numbered among those who take foolish 
chances. 

The next I knew distinctly, it was dawning. I fed my mattress to 
Chusquito and set up my kitchenette in the most sheltered corner of 
the corredor, bent on concocting a hot broth with a lump of ice from 
the bottom of a leaning cantaro. The directions on my magic can 
of concentrated soup asserted that " one cube with hot water makes a 
delicious bouillon." But this, experience had demonstrated, should 
be taken with a grain of salt — also four other cubes. Even under the 
lee of my alforjas the rum-burner went out at the faintest breath of 
wind, but by constant coaxing, and at the imminent risk of setting fire 
to my possessions, I managed even to boil the two eggs that remained 

368 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

whole, though so great was the altitude that with eight minutes of boil- 
ing they were still soft. Gravelly bread of Huancavelica, and a native 
" chocolate " that was really a pebbly brown sugar, topped off a meal 
I might have longed for in vain at that hour in the best hotel of Peru. 
Many an hour on the road, during the best part of the day for walking, 
that simple little contrivance gave me, when I should otherwise have 
been waiting on the sleepy natives for breakfast. 

By the time I had eaten, the householder appeared in his slit panties 
with white buttons down the sides, and a fancy upper garment evi- 
dently intended to impress me with his importance. But when he noted 
by daylight with whom he had to do, he gradually shrivelled up to a 
half-friendly smile, and accepted with a pretence of gratitude a coin 
for his forced hospitality and newly decorated roof. A silver-ringed, 
black cane, leaning against what Chusquito had seen fit to leave of the 
stone wall, proved him one of the " authorities " of the region. Above 
it stood a crude cross decorated with dry grass, designed to keep evil 
spirits — except those in bottles — away from the cluster of huts. 
Either my host's knowledge of the trail ahead, or his manner of im- 
parting it, was extremely hazy, and I dragged Chusquito away across 
the pampa in the cutting cold, but invigorating mountain air, burdened 
with the task of finding ourselves once more. 

Within an hour we were so fortunate as to fall again upon a trail, 
where I could relinquish the tiller and drift into those day-dreams that 
come upon the solitary traveler across these vast Andean punas. Snow 
had fallen during the night, and a great white immensity, slightly undu- 
lating, spread out to infinity before us. We shared an all-night thirst 
that set us both to munching snow at frequent intervals. By ten the 
sun had burned away the whiteness and restored to the scene its accus- 
tomed monk's robe of faded yellow-brown. All morning I continued 
to guess the way across a steadily rising world, in the utter silence that 
makes more impressive the dreariness of these lofty regions, until at 
noon we panted over a jagged rock-ridge from which all the kingdoms 
of the earth lay spread out below us, tumbled, broken, and velvety 
brown as far as the eye could command even in this transparent air. 
As we started gradually downward, shepherds and their flocks ap- 
peared once more, then little fenced patches and stone-heap hovels ; 
then we dropped almost suddenly into the blazing hot valley of a little 
river, along which tiled huts and travelers were numerous. Several 
times I went astray and waged pitched battle with Chusquito cross- 
country, past hovels swarming like disturbed beehives with barking 

369 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

dogs, before I once more got securely under our feet the trail that was 
to lead us upward again over the next paramo. It is not merely that 
the stupid inhabitants of these regions speak only Quichua, but they 
are incapable of giving intelligent directions, even in that tongue. 
There is something exhilarating in the air of Andean heights that 
breeds reflection and a peaceful serenity of mind; but it is nature, 
rather than humanity, that awakens the marked optimism of spirits. 
The traveler grows " inspired," lifted up out of himself by the mag- 
nificence of the scene, realizing for a moment how marvelous is this 
world we inhabit; then suddenly an Indian, a human being, intrudes, 
and snatches him back to earth again. Time after time I caught sight 
of an approaching figure which the mind, from youthful force of habit, 
imbued with human intelligence — and as many times it turned out to 
be a shuffling Indian, stupid and glassy-eyed from the quid of coca in 
his cheek and the chicha and pisco of the last hamlet in his belly, 
who cringed like some degenerate animal as he passed, mumbling some 
Quichua monosyllable. Incapable of intelligent reply, even when they 
are not in a half-drunken stupor, these plodding creatures have a very 
hazy notion of distance. The acco, or time of duration of a quid of 
coca, which they throw on the achepetas, or symbolical stone-heaps 
along the way, is at best but an uncertain term of length, and their 
besotted intellects seldom retain the memory of any number above 
three or four. So that, in spite of the frequent appearance of fellow- 
travelers, I had perforce to be satisfied with the half-certainty that I 
was on the right road, without any notion of whether the nearest shel- 
ter was one, or ten leagues distant. 

Clouds crawled into the evening sky again, where the daytime sun- 
shine had swept it clean ; the purple shadows of the mountains, across 
the tops of which the setting sun cast a crimson glow, spread and 
darkened, and I had visions of shivering out another night in the 
corredor of an Indian hut, or out on the bare, freezing pampa. I had 
suffered so many dreary nights, twelve hours long, in South America, 
that it had become a habit to lose my cheerful mood in the late after- 
noon and succumb to apprehension, as of some impending misfor- 
tune. Under this I developed unconsciously a pace so swift that 
Chusquito, like a small boy trying to keep up with an inconsiderate 
father, took to trotting every little while some distance ahead. We 
were now far up again on a cold puna across which the bitter mountain 
wind swept unchecked, and even my companion seemed to cast ap- 
prehensive glances at the angry, black clouds overspreading the sky, 

370 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

and at the cold dusk descending upon us. We hurried unbrokenly on, 
without a sign of town or hamlet, though the last Indian stragglers 
still bore sufficient evidences of intoxication that proved it could be 
no great distance off. Then, in the last rays of daylight, we turned a 
wind-whipped boulder and caught sight of the place, far off in the lap 
of a stony valley, well aware from long Andean experience that the 
intervening distance was much greater than appearance suggested. 

Black night had long since settled down when I found myself sur- 
rounded by indistinct, low structures that turned out to be Acabamba, 
home of one Zambrano, for whom I bore a letter from the " Turks." 
As often as I inquired for him, however, there came back that Spanish- 
American-Indian mumble of indifference and distrust, " Mas arriba," 
— higher up," until I felt like a District Attorney on the trail of 
" graft." When a half-civilized youth in " store " clothes gave me 
the same identical, lackadaisical answer for the tenth or twentieth time, 
I caught him by the slack of the garments and jerked him into the 
street, with a polite ultimatum to conduct me in person to that elusive 
upper region. 

He led the interminable, cobbled way down one street and up an- 
other, equally unlighted, and finally stopped before a zaguan with an 
" Aqui, senor." I cut off his proposed escape, and drove him into the 
patio to summon the man of the house. He returned with the Indian 
mayordomo, and the information that the Zambrano who lived there 
was not the one I sought, and was, moreover, out of town. The youth 
proposed that he " go look for " the right Zambrano. 
- " No, indeed, my friend," I countered. " You will stay right with 
me while we look for him." 

" Si, senor," said the youth in a shivering voice. Then he turned 
back across town and plaza by another route, and pointed out the 
Zambrano household exactly two doors from the one out of which I 
had originally snatched him. The flock of women who surged out 
upon me greeted me with the threadbare " No 'sta 'ca ! " He never 
was — when I bore a letter to him. The wife spelled it out laboriously 
under the blinking light of a home-made tallow candle, then invited 
me into the earth-floored " parlor," separated by a calico curtain from 
the little shop she kept. 

" There is no one in Acobamba who prepares food for strangers," 
she replied to my roundabout hint, " but we shall serve you such as 
we can here in our poor house." 

While the mystery to come was cooking, I managed to get inoffen- 

37i 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

sively into her possession the price of a peck of grain for Chusquito — 
and some time later found the poor, misused animal munching about 
two cents' worth of old, dry corn-husks in the corral. 

" It is," murmured the wife, in reply to my questioning gesture, 
"that there is no grain in town — at these hours." But though she 
would have considered an insult any direct offer of a traveler con- 
signed to her husband by letter to pay for his accommodation, she care- 
fully avoided any further reference to the grain-money. 

It would have been in the highest degree scandalous to have lodged 
a stranger in her own dwelling during the absence of the head of the 
household. But the delegation of females, having discovered, by dint 
of turning the house wrong-side out, the massive key of a mud-flanked 
door across the street, let me into an abandoned shop lumbered with 
the accumulated odds and ends of many years, an immense, woven- 
straw hogshead full of shelled corn bulking above the rest. A creaking 
board counter, barely five feet long, was the only available sleeping 
space. The only means of avoiding asphyxiation was to leave the door 
open to any passing sneak-thief or congenital hater of gringos. But 
even had the risk been great, the key would have proved an effective 
weapon. Unfortunately it would have been anti-simpatico to have 
felled with it the solicitous night-hawks who called my frequent at- 
tention to the perils of night air, not merely by rapping on the door, 
but by prodding me in the ribs with their sticks. 

It was butchering day in Acobamba when I awoke, and at the sug- 
gestion of my hostess I sent a servant to buy ten cents' worth of meat. 
She returned with an entire basketful, — eight slabs of raw, red beef, 
each as large as an honest sirloin steak " for two." Virtually every 
shop in town being a pulperia, it was easy to lay in supplies for the 
road ahead. But though competition was brisk in all other wares, for 
some reason I was never able to fathom, in all the region of the cen- 
tral Andes my favorite food was always hedged round with refusals. 
As often as I stepped into a shop where a basket of eggs was displayed, 
I was sure to be informed in a dull, uninviting monotone, " No estan de 
venta." " Of course they are not for sale," the experienced Peruvian 
wayfarer soon learns to reply, " No Andean lady who considers her- 
self a lady would think of selling eggs. But — er " — meanwhile pick- 
ing out the largest specimens of the fruit in question — " I have taken 
a dozen. How much ? " 

The answer was sure to be a meek, " Dos reales — ten cents, senor." 

Over the lofty, tumbled world ahead the way was often so steep and 

372 



OVERLAND TOWARD CUZCO 

stony and contorted that Chusquito more than once fell on his neck, 
and threatened to twist himself permanently out of shape. It was 
a land so dry and barren that only the half -liter of pisco kept my thirst 
endurable. Whenever I paused for a sip, my companion glanced fur- 
tively and anxiously back at me, as if he remembered other masters who 
had got bad tempers out of bottles along the way. But his was none 
of your meek and canine dispositions that permit abuse unprotest- 
ingly. On the level, high pampas, with all the world spread out in full 
view about us, the exhilaration of scene and air caused me unconsciously 
to set so swift a pace that I was obliged frequently to kick the brute 
out from under my feet — until he retaliated by suddenly projecting 
one small, shod hoof against a shin that I was distinctly aware of for 
days afterward. 

One afternoon, not fifty miles beyond Acabamba, I was threatened 
with violence for the first time during my fifteen months in South 
America. I sat beside a mountain pool, coaxing my cooking-outfit un- 
der shelter of my alforjas, when two half-Indians, bleary-eyed with 
drink, appeared on stout mules. They had nearly passed when they 
caught sight of me, and charged forward in drunken insolence, all but 
trampling my possessions under the hoofs of their animals. In the 
haste of the moment I made the error of showing aggressiveness to the 
point of drawing my revolver — and came perilously near having to use 
it for my mistake. When reflection caused me to change my tactics 
and humor them like the witless children they were, the danger was 
dissipated like a puff of smoke. Within ten minutes the pair grew so 
maudlinly affectionate that they insisted on shaking hands alternately 
a dozen times each, and at length rode slowly away, casting frequent 
besotted, loving glances behind them. 

Across a barren paramo ahead the mood struck me to cheer the 
long hours with my mouth-organ. Even the Indian carries one of 
these, or a reed flute on his journeys, and whiles away the sky-gazing 
solitudes with monotonous ditties. But I was soon forced to forgo 
the pleasure. Not merely did that plebian instrument in the hands of 
a gringo bring glances of unconcealed contempt from the rare horse- 
men who passed, but I could no sooner strike up than Chusquito, un- 
humanly frank and honest in his criticisms, would lay back his ears 
and trot ahead well out of hearing, with some peril to my pack, before 
he would consent to fall again into a walk. 



373 



CHAPTER XV 

THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

IT was in the scattered caserio of Marcas that I overtook a 
traveling piano. I had barely installed myself by force and 
strategy in a mud den, and tied Chusquito to a molle tree before 
a heap of straw in which he alternately rolled and ate, when a party of 
getite arrived, among them an old woman of the well-to-do chola class, 
carried astride the shoulders of an Indian. Their chief spokesman was 
a lawyer named Anchorena, a white man of some education "and even 
a slight inkling of geography, who was importing an upright piano 
for his mansion in Ayacucho. With the descending night came a 
score of Indians carrying a large, crude harp, several fifes and guitars, 
and a drum, to install themselves along the mud benches of the corredor 
of the building inside which the more or less drink-maudlin gente had 
spread themselves. It is never the Peruvian's way to interfere with 
the celebrations of his underlings, however disturbing these may be, 
and far into the night the " musicians " kept up an unbroken, dismal, 
tuneless, indigenous wail that forced whoever would be heard to shout. 
Anchorena, professionally inclined to like the sound of his own voice 
best, bellowed the evening through in an endless account of a fellow- 
townsman's visit to New York a bare ten years before. Of all the 
marvelous experience, what seemed to astonish both the teller and his 
hearers most, all but choking the Indian-riding old woman with in- 
credulity as often as he repeated it, was the alleged fact that in the 
best New York hotels guests were not permitted to spit on the floor. 
Come to think of it, that probably would astonish a Peruvian. 

To my surprise the natives were off ahead of us in the morning, and 
Chusquito had picked his way many hundred feet down a stair-like 
trail before we sighted the boxed piano, lying on its back on a bit of 
level ground far below, with some twenty-five motley-arrayed Indians 
squatted about it. The lawyer shook hands effusively and, putting 
Chusquito in charge of the barefoot squire who was leading his own 
cream-colored coast horse, invited me to listen to his endless chatter 
while we continued the swift descent together. 

374 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

The piano, made in Germany, had been set down in Lima for $500. 
Freight to Huancayo had added ten percent, to the cost. From the 
end of the railway to Ayacucho, a scant two hundred miles, the exotic 
plaything must be transported on men's backs, as the Incas imported a 
thousand things — if not pianos — in the days of their power. This 
stage of the journey would, under ordinary circumstances, have nearly 
doubled the cost of the instrument. But Anchorena had the advantage 
of owning a large hacienda in the great hot valley toward which we 
were descending, and was able to cut the expense in two by drawing 
upon his own peons for the labor of transportation. Three distinct 
gangs had been sent from his estate, each to bear the burden a third 
of the distance. They were paid the extraordinary wage of twenty 
cents a day, and supplied food, chicha, and coca. Each gang carried 
the piano for a week, and it was the second party celebrating the ar- 
rival of the third that had made noisy the night at Marcas. 

Each morning, shortly after midnight, the Indians rose to munch 
mote, or boiled corn, for an hour or more, after which a heavy soup of 
corn, potatoes, beans, and charqui, was served. Then for another hour 
the men poked coca leaves one by one into their cheeks, mixing them 
with lime from their little gourds, and by dawn, the effect of the chew- 
ing having made itself felt, they rose to their feet and were off. Some 
forty peons set their shoulders to the several poles attached to the 
boxed piano, a picket-line with shovels, axes, and ropes was thrown out 
in advance to widen the trail and lend assistance in the steeper places, 
and an army of servants, cooks, squires, and the numerous capatazes, 
or bosses, required for any effective Indian labor, brought up the rear 
of the expedition. 

From the punas of the day before, totally barren but for the dreary, 
yellow ichu, we had descended through a zone of scrub bushes, lower 
still through thirstless, sand-loving cactus, and were now dropping 
swiftly through a dead, desert landscape by zigzag trails as painfully 
steep and unpeopled as those of the Ecuador-Peruvian boundary. 
Architecture changed with the altitude, so that the openwork huts be- 
came little more than thatch roofs on poles, shading the languid, loafing 
inhabitants of a place called Huarpo, hot as Panama, on the edge of a 
river cutting off a broad, sandy valley I had seen from the sky the day 
before. The surrounding region was a cofardia, that is, it belonged to 
some wooden saint to whom it had been bequeathed by a beata, one of 
the many pious old women who have thus left great tracts of the An- 
des perpetually in morte main. For the desire of these sanctimonious 

375 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

matrons is to provide a permanent income for the masses requisite to 
the repose of their souls, and as their piety is commonly tempered with 
experience of the ways of this world, they usually reject the suggestion 
of the Church to sell the property and give the money directly to the 
priest, lest he grow forgetful, in a way even priests have, and neglect 
his duty toward .the" dwellers in purgatory. Huarpo is also paludic, 
or raging with intermittent fevers, and no wise man drinks water 
within sight of it. The appearance of a gringo in their midst aroused 
even these languid, fever-hued, desert people to an unusual concentra- 
tion of attention, one bedraggled female bursting out at last with a 
remark in Quichua too rapid for my ears, but which the lawyer trans- 
lated : " Caramba ! Si yo estaba prenada de seguro saldria la cara 
gringuita ! " It is a common superstition in the Andes that a child 
will closely resemble the person the mother has looked most fixedly 
upon during the months before its birth. 

In spite of the fact that everything I owned in South America, not 
only my letter of credit and the papers necessary to prove my identity, 
but even my money, had been left in my alforjas under the tender care 
of an Indian boy miles behind, I did little worrying. The Andean 
traveler soon grows accustomed to trusting his possessions to penniless 
peons, for losses are astonishingly rare. For all that, I caught myself 
glancing anxiously now and then up the wall of shale and loose rock 
that piled into the sky above us. The piano-movers made good 
time, in spite of many a zigzag and desert precipice, where rope and 
home-made tackle and the widening of the trail were often necessary. 
We had not enjoyed the shade of the huts an hour before the van- 
guard appeared, and shortly afterward the lawyer's bulky toy was laid 
in the baking sand beside us, and the sweating, dust-covered carriers 
swarmed about the huge jar of chicha de molle that had been purchased 
for them. Progress would have been much less rapid but for the fact 
that the third gang, knowing theirs was the last shift, realized the ad- 
vantage of finishing the journey to Ayacucho as soon as possible. Yet 
their conception of hurrying was not exactly vertigenous. They halted 
a long hour, not to eat, which they did only morning and evening, but 
to prepare new quids of coca. From a large grain-sack the lawyer 
dealt out to each of the peons with his own fair hand a small handful 
of the narcotic leaves. They slunk forward one by one, with out- 
stretched hats, and a hint of eagerness on their besotted, expressionless 
faces, with the air of men who would have sold their souls for this few 
cents' worth of brutalizing leaves. 

376 




On the "road" to Ayacuclio I overtook a lawyer who was importing a piano. It required 

three gangs of Indians and nearly a month's time to transport the instrument 

less than 200 miles from the end of the railway line 




Carrying the piano across one of the typical bridges of the Peruvian Andes. In many 

places the trail had to be widened or recut, and the instrument had now and then 

to be let down or hauled up with ropes, or block and tackle 



THE ROUTE OF THE GONQUISTADORES 

Chusquito, who had appeared at last, all intact but as covered with 
fine sand as from a trip across the Sahara, was too tiny to have crossed 
the river without wetting my baggage. It was the cream-colored coast 
horse that saved me a detour of several miles to a bridge down-stream. 
Except for the lawyer and his mayordomos, the expedition stripped to 
the waist and forded the stream inch by inch under the piano, slipping 
individually, but fortunately not in unison, on the stones at the bottom, 
and spending a half-hour in a precarious task that would have been 
impossible in any but the dry season. In the shade of a molle grove 
beyond, Anchorena, who had recently been won to up-to-date methods, 
dealt out a quinine pill to each of the Indians. Few were able to 
swallow them without chewing, and made wry faces and animal noises 
in consequence. Several surreptitiously got rid of the detested white 
man's remedy while their master's eyes were not upon them. Though 
the day was still young, the cavalcade was to camp on the edge of the 
drowsy, sand-carpeted town of Izcutaco, a bare mile above the river, 
and when I left them the cooks were already heating over a blazing 
fire of molle berries the enormous iron kettle, six feet in diameter, 
under which an Indian had plodded, bent double, all day. When I 
took leave of the lawyer, he hoped to reach Ayacucho in four days, 
making the journey from Huancayo three weeks in duration, at a total 
cost of about $250, without reckoning the labor lost on his hacienda 
while the three gangs were going and coming and recuperating from 
their unwonted toil. 

The molle tree covered all the great, tilted plain before me, lending 
it an inviting green tinge in spite of its semi-desert character. Its 
leaves are not unlike those of the willow, and it produces in clusters 
great quantities of a peppery red berry somewhat resembling the cur- 
rant in appearance, and those of our red cedar in taste. These are well 
supplied with saccharine and ferment readily, constituting the chief 
curse of the region, in the form of an intoxicant so cheap and plentiful 
that the inhabitants are more often drunk than working. 

In Huanta the addressee of my Turkish letter was Don Emilio, 

, a hearty countryman pleasantly free from the tiresome " polish " 

of the Latin-American city-dweller. Early in our conversation he took 
pains to inform me that he never permitted a priest to cross his 
threshold. A fellow-townsman later confided to me that the prohibi- 
tion dated from the day that the oldest daughter of my host had been 
betrayed through the ministrations of the confessional. There was 
something pleasantly reminiscent of old patriarchial days in the way 

377 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

we all sat at meat together around the long table in the back corredor, 
surrounded by a flock of servants, the older, shy-mannered girls rising 
now and then during the meal to tend shop. Yet it is not easy to make 
oneself agreeable to such a family, for lack of intellectual interests cuts 
down the conversation to the simplest matters. The women of the 
household preferred the guttural Quichua, but Don Emilio found 
that tongue more difficult than his accustomed Spanish. My host was 
one of the " city fathers," and perhaps the best-read man in the com- 
munity, yet he referred to the United States and Europe as " a place 
somewhere up the coast," and desired to know whether Italy was 
in New York, or New York in Italy. I attempted, in my struggle 
to make conversation, to give the family some conception of our north- 
ern midwinters. 

" Brr ! Nearly as cold as Huancavelica, it must be," shivered the 
wife. 

" How high is the highest Andes in your United States ? " asked Don 
Emilio, with a hint of suspicion in his voice. 

I told him. 

" Then it is impossible for it to be cold there," he cried, conclusively, 
" for that is scarcely higher than Huanta itself." 

Huanta lies close to the great montaila, or Amazonian hot-lands, and 
the " chocolate de Huanta " is famous throughout Peru. But the trails 
to that fruitful region are so nearly impassable that the interchange of 
products is only a fraction of what it might be. Set in one of the dry 
belts that are so frequent in the Andes, the great, tilted plain depends 
on irrigation for most of its fruits. Molle, fig, and willow trees abound, 
yet the ground beneath them is barren of grass. Eighty percent, of 
the valley is said to be chiefly Indian in blood. Peons are paid an 
average of twelve cents a day, and judging from what I saw of them, 
they are grossly overpaid. Nearly a half-century ago Squier found 
" drunkenness universal throughout the Sierra, and nothing neglected 
that could be turned into intoxicating beverages." To this day there 
is slight improvement in this respect. Thanks to the molle berry, in- 
temperance is high, even for Peru, and laziness reaches its culmination 
during the season when the tunas, ripening on the cactus hedges, feed 
alike birds and Indians. In the town almost every hut is a little 
drunkery, with an inviting display of bottles of all shapes and sizes. 
The life of the place was typified by a soft-muscled lump of a man 
sitting in the shade of his shop, drowsily switching flies off himself 
with a horse's tail mounted on a wooden handle. To have seen him 

378 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

reading a book, or even whittling a stick, would have been entirely out 
of keeping with the local color. 

House-flies, unknown in the upper altitudes, were more than numer- 
ous. Cats, too, were in evidence for almost the first time in the Sierra. 
The assertion of scientists that these cannot endure high regions was 
denied by the natives, who attributed their absence elsewhere to the 
lack of rats to feed on. Dogs, unfortunately, are indifferent to either 
drawback, and the Andean town has yet to be discovered that does not 
swarm with them. Llamas avoid Huanta, and the climate is more fitted 
to donkeys than to mountain ponies. An Indian trotted in from one 
of the irrigated alfalfares on the edge of town with a poncho-load of 
fresh, green alfalfa, gay with purple and red flowers, soon after our 
arrival. But at the first taste of this new species of fodder Chusquito 
showed keen disappointment. Like myself, he preferred regions of 
ten thousand feet and upward. During most of our stay he hung 
sad and dejected, as if homesick for the cold, penetrating air and the 
wiry grass of his native mountains, and it was here that I saw him 
lie down for the first time since we had joined forces. 

We pushed on to Ayacucho under no very auspicious circumstances, 
for the department capital was reported to be raging with an epidemic 
of typhoid and small-pox that had forced it to ask aid of the central 
government. The day's tramp varied from a blazing, semi-tropical 
gorge to a barren, waterless range so lofty that I found it necessary to 
stretch out on my back at the summit to catch my breath. A- con- 
trary mood, or too long a rest, made Chusquito choose to be obstreper- 
ous' beyond all custom, and twice he set his heart wilfully on branch 
trails, and came perilously near escaping with all my possessions. 
Thereafter I kept him tied to my belt, and for once he set a pace more 
swift than I would have had it. Early in the afternoon the blazing 
desert landscape was broken by the sight of a city that could have been 
no other than Ayacucho, filling the hollow of a green bowl, several hut- 
lined streets radiating upward from it, like the legs of some great 
tarantula stretched on its back. A perfectly level road seemed to prom- 
ise a quick entrance ; but almost at the edge of the town the world fell 
suddenly away into a bottomless earthquake crack, where we sweated 
for an hour in a headlong descent far out of sight of human habitation, 
and toiled upward again to the crest of the horizon, all to advance a 
bare five hundred yards. Raging with thirst, we strode swiftly down 
upon the town, only to be blocked at the edge of it by a religious pro- 
cession of hundreds of girls in snow-white dress. As if to show off 

379 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

before his fellow-countrymen, Chusquito redoubled his cussedness, and 
persisted, in spite of all my efforts, in taking advantage of the smooth, 
flagstone sidewalks, forcing two-legged pedestrians into the rough- 
cobbled street. It did not occur to me that he, too, might be foot-sore. 
At the first open door through which I spied bottles, he attempted to 
enter with me, and watched me disgustedly while I opened a bottle of 
native soda-water, a second, then a third, until the proprietress all but 
fainted with astonishment at sight of a man who came on foot drink- 
ing up a whole fifteen cents' worth at once — and actually paying for 
it. 

Both the hotels of Ayacucho were the usual low buildings, extending 
around a large court one entered beneath a topheavy archway, where 
guests appeared to be considered a nuisance, to be avoided by both host 
and servants as long as possible. I was finally awarded a dungeon 
opening directly on all the assorted activities, misdemeanors, and in- 
decencies indigenous to the cobbled patios of Andean hotels, but which 
had the unusual feature of a window — with wooden bars, for glass 
is a luxury, even in an important department capital. The chamber was 
cool to the point of sogginess and had, of course, to be cleared out and 
furnished to my order. It was apparent that here was a city that would 
reward several days' stay, and I set about finding more fitting accommo- 
dations for Chusquito than the circle about a post to which he had 
been confined at every halt since he had come into my possession. Long 
search and persistent inquiry brought me to a professional inverna, a 
term supposed to designate a green pasture in which an animal ac- 
cepted as guest can wallow and gorge to his heart's content. For- 
tunately I am nothing if not sceptical in such Peruvian matters and, 
sure enough, investigation proved the place to be only a bare field 
in which the owner promised to give " plenty of food and water " at 
ten cents a day. Promises and starvation are too closely allied in the 
Andes, where he who will know his animal well fed must see to the 
feeding in person. I had all but resigned myself and the maltreated 
beast to the inevitable, and had ordered a load of alfalfa brought to the 
hotel patio, when I ran across the piano importer, who begged me to do 
him the honor of letting him send the animal to his farm a few miles 
out of town. When at last I got to bed, my sleep was full of feverish 
dreams in which I was dragged to destruction times without number 
over bottomless precipices by a rope tied to my belt, while I gazed 
about me in vain for a patch of green in a bald and blistered landscape. 

At first sight this half-green hole in the ground, surrounded by 

380 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

cactus-grown stretches of loose stones and bare, repulsive mountains, 
seemed a queer place for a city. But the situation improves somewhat 
upon closer acquaintance. Under the scanty trees that lend the hollow 
its color the soil is fertile when favored by the rains, and those who can 
avoid going out in the middle of the day will find the climate little 
short of perfect. The main drawbacks to what might be a not un- 
pleasant dwelling-place are the absence of even the rudiments of hy- 
giene, and the whirlwinds that spring up often with sudden, unex- 
pected violence and envelop the town in clouds of dust and evidence 
of the absence of street-sweepers, or bring down a wintry wave from 
the snowclad to the south that lends its contrast to the picture. 

At the time of the Conquest the only gathering of mankind corre- 
sponding to the present city was what Prescott calls " Huamanga, 
midway between Lima and Cuzco." The story runs that an Inca, pass- 
ing through the region, was sitting at meat out-of-doors when he saw, 
circling above him, a magnificent huaman, Quichua for falcon. Struck 
with admiration, he held up a choice morsel crying, " Huaman ca ! 
— Take it, falcon ! " Whatever the truth of the legend, the depart- 
ment of which Ayacucho is the capital is still known as Huamanga. 
The city itself takes its name from the Quichua terms ay a (corpse), 
and ccucho (corner), in other words, "Dead Man's Corner." Long 
before the arrival of the Spaniards all this region was thus known be- 
cause of a great battle between the fierce local tribes and those of 
Cuzco, in which the latter were routed. But the tables were turned 
under Huayna Ccapac, the Great, who colonized the territory by the 
customary Inca method of settling it with mitimaes, or " transplanted 
people " from another province. The great military highway passed 
close to the present site, but the only town of any size between Huan- 
cayo and Cuzco in early colonial days was Huari, now an insignificant 
Indian village lost among the stony hills. Manco, the revolted Inca, 
and his followers formed the chronic habit of falling upon travelers be- 
tween the ancient and the new capital of Peru, and in 1548 Pizarro 
ordered a city founded for their protection, usually known as Hua- 
manga. Not until after what is known to history as the Battle of 
Ayacucho, in which Sucre defeated the Spanish veterans who had fled 
before Bolivar from the icy pampa of Junin, and brought to an end 
the struggle of the new. world for political freedom begun in New Eng- 
land a half-century before, was the older and more appropriate name 
revived. 

In colonial times it was a far more important city. A census taken 

381 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

by a German in 1736 showed a population of more than 40,000. To- 
day it has barely two inhabitants for each of its 8000 feet elevation 
above sea-level. Even Squier found it " laid out on a grand scale, but 
with unmistakable signs of a great decline in wealth and population." 
Epidemics of smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever, the advance of 
machinery and foreign importation over the local handicraft manufac- 
ture of tocayo (cloth from the cactus fiber), frasadas, or hand-woven 
blankets, and native shoes, with the corresponding decrease in the 
growing of cotton in the region, were the chief causes of this decline. 
Then, too, the building of railroads left the ancient route from Lima to 
Cuzco stranded, and only a rare gringo andarin, driving a shaggy and 
sun-faded chusquito, comes now to visit the once proud city. Should 
the long-threatened railway across Peru ever come to pass, Ayacucho, 
like Huancavelica, may come more or less into her own again. 

The cities of our own land are not without their faults, but he who 
would fully realize the advantages of even the most backward of them 
should come and dwell for a time in one of these shipwrecked " capi- 
tals " of the Andes. By night Ayacucho is " lighted " by dim kerosene 
contrivances, mildly resembling a miner's torch, inside square, glass- 
sided lanterns of medieval origin, each house-owner paying from five 
to twenty cents a month for his share of the illumination. Gradually, 
however, electric lights were being installed — those pale, ought- 
to-be-sixteen-candle-power bulbs indigenous to Andean towns — 
against which a considerable opposition had developed because of the 
threatened cost of nearly a dollar monthly to each householder. In 
view of the fact that the average shop rents for $3 a month, it was nat- 
ural that so decided an increase in expenses should be resented. The 
huge main plaza is garnished only with a central fountain surrounded 
by the customary iron fence, " due to the untold patriotism of Juan Fu- 
lano, ex-alcalde, etc.," and a few ancient, backless, rough-stone benches. 
The favorite loafers' gathering-place is under the portales, or arcades, 
that surround the square on three sides. These are lined with shops 
into the blue-black shadows of which the plaza-stroller's eyes peer 
gratefully, but wellnigh blindly, from the blazing sunshine outside. 
Compared even with Spain, Ayacucho harbors an unbelievable number 
of non-producers. Hundreds of little shops, endlessly duplicated, 
stretch away along its every street, tended by lounging men and women 
with no other desire in life than to sell a few cents' worth of something, 
particularly strong drink, and not even desiring that very decidedly. 
Their business methods are crude in the extreme. The town, for ex- 

382 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

ample, is noted for its native chocolate. The cacao beans grown in 
the montaha on the east are hulled and roasted, mixed with crude 
sugar and vanilla, and crushed and rolled again and again by hand 
under stone rollers, producing a gravelly, but not untoothsome product. 
Yet, though every merchant in town is ready to sell these individually at 
2j^ cents a cake, not one of them can be induced to sell by weight. 
" No es costumbre," answers every man, woman, and child tending 
shop, and though all hover on the verge of poverty, not a man among 
them will overstep fixed custom, even to this extent, to win a less pre- 
carious livelihood. For a country where " trusts " are unknown the 
entire town is rather staunchly agreed on prices. The money in use 
is almost exclusively silver, which is lugged back and forth through 
the streets in cotton bags. Many of the coins, having at some time 
served as female adornment, have holes in them, .and though these 
are perfectly acceptable to Ayacucho, they are worthless elsewhere in 
the country, so that to my usual task of gathering small change for the 
road ahead was added that of carefully weeding out all holed pieces. 
The average ayacuchano has a kind of crude insolence and an arrogance 
bred in isolated places which, added to his mountaineer uncouthness, 
makes him not over pleasant. Toward me they assumed a suspicious 
air that suggested some foreigner had once long ago cheated some one 
among them out of ten cents. Even for Peruvians, the plighted word 
of every grade of inhabitant is peculiarly worthless. Of a dozen or 
more promises of larger or smaller importance made me during my 
stay, not one ever reached even the point of attempted fulfilment. The 
population is very largely Indian — often in diluted form — and gen- 
uinely white persons are decidedly rare, certainly not ten percent., 
though there are many more than that, strutting about in what Aya- 
cucho fancies faultless dress, who consider themselves such, and who 
would be astonished at the set-back their pretentions would receive in 
more exacting communities. The town swarms with tailors, chiefly 
boys and youths with slight ability at their trade, who sit, like the crafts- 
men of Damascus, in little shops the entire front of which is open door, 
and work steadily but languidly on miserable materials that barely last 
long enough for purchaser and seller to part, their attention chiefly on 
whatever passes in the street. The Indians of the region still weave a 
heavy wool frazada of astounding combinations of color, and the town 
is somewhat noted for the filigree work and wood-carving for which 
it was once famous. But for the most part it is silent, smokeless, and 
industry-lacking as any village of the Andes, without a single wheeled 

383 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

vehicle to rumble over its cobbles. Its water is so bad that even the 
natives admitted I should not drink it. Indeed, I did not even dare 
develop films in it. Not that its source is ill-chosen, but in the several 
miles of open conduit to the city, the Indians make free use of it for any 
of their lavatory processes. The local Quichua dialect varies much 
from that of Cuzco, the Florence of the Inca tongue, so that Indians 
from the two towns understand each other with difficulty. 

Ayacucho is about as badly overdone in churches as any town in 
church-boasting South America. In colonial days a religious edifice 
was built on the slightest provocation, of cut-stone if possible, of cobbles 
or adobe if necessary, until to-day the entire population might be 
housed five times over in those that are left. Not a few are things of 
beauty in their time-mellowed delapidation. The cathedral, centuries 
old, is surpassed in all Peru only by those of Lima and Cuzco. Ex- 
ternally, and at some distance, like so many things of Spanish origin, it 
has an imposing and not inartistic appearance. But the interior is 
disappointing. Here is the usual Latin-American garish gaudiness of 
wooden, tin, and porcelain saints, with no suggestion of art, except 
in the intricately carved wooden pulpit and the choir stalls flanking the 
altar. Behind each of the latter a boy stands during services, holding 
a candle above the chanting friar whose bulk amply fills the niche. 
A spittoon is provided for each of the singers. Ash-trays had evi- 
dently not yet come into style. An unusual feature was seats for 
the congregation, which in most churches of the Andes is left to kneel 
on the bare floor, or to bring a servant carrying a prie-dieu. It was 
the first place in Peru where the beating of church-bells reached any- 
thing like the hubbub of Ecuador or Colombia, for Ayacucho is so 
fanatical that the law against this is openly disobeyed. Sleek, well- 
fed, cigarette-smoking priests are everywhere in evidence, scores of 
" barefoot " friars in their stout leather sandals waddle about town 
with the self-complacency of the sacred bulls of India, and the public 
appearance of the bishop brings all activity to a standstill, and all be- 
holders except the upper-class men to their knees. 

As in most centers of religious fanaticism, the town reeks with 
poverty. Even for South America, the overwhelming display of rags 
is striking, and ignorance and debauch is in constant evidence. Yet the 
children, the babies particularly, sometimes have a brightness and an 
innocence about them that suggests what might be made of them 
could they be caught young, very, very young, and taken away from 
this environment of dirt and ignorance and immorality and priests. 

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THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

Yet who knows ? The more one travels, the more one's opinion wavers 
between the effects of ancestry and environment. 

It has been said of Ayacucho that her chief occupations are drinking, 
cock-fighting, love-making, and religious processions. The last is 
most in public evidence. The first fiesta to break out after my arrival 
was that of the " Virgen de las Mercedes." All shops closed for 
the occasion, and the entire region boomed and clanged with the 
exertions of gangs of boys filling every belfry and vying with each 
other in adding to the uproar. At four of the afternoon, when the 
sun had lost some of its glare, the cathedral disgorged a solemn 
throng escorting three huge floats that began a snail-paced circuit of 
the broad plaza, halting before every building of importance while 
the choir sang some Latin anthem. Before the Virgin and her two 
accompanying saints, all flashing with rich and many-colored silks, 
marched teams of sanctimonious-faced beatas with ribbons over their 
shoulders, feigning to supply the motive power which was, in reality, 
furnished by toiling and sweating Indians half -concealed beneath the 
massive floats. As the head of the procession reached certain points, 
an aged Indian acolyte set off home-made fireworks of intricate and 
long-enduring design, that filled the air as with a sudden bombard- 
ment. The instant these fell silent, swarms of boys raced into the 
smoke from every side to fight with the low-caste functionary for 
possession of the charred framework. Every male, as well as the 
Indian women, uncovered as the figures passed — except myself, too 
busy with photography to honor the local customs. Yet, where a 
century ago such sign of the heretic would have caused homicidal 
riot, I heard only one audible protest — from some one of the news- 
boy order. 

Of course few inhabitants of the town had any notion of its history 
back of their own lifetime, nor any real interest in abetting my in- 
vestigations, though all pretended to bubble over with enthusiasm for 
them. A blank indifference hangs like moss over the records of the 
past throughout all the Andes, and the curious traveler will find more 
by wandering around until he stumbles upon them, than by making 
inquiries. Not only are the natives ignorant of all points of historical 
interest, but utterly incapable of distinguishing any such from so 
much junk. It is just as useless to call upon the " representative 
men," for the minds of these differ only in slight degree from the 
gente del pueblo. Ayacucho has more than the usual excuse for this 
ignorance of her past, however, for in 1883 the Chilians marched into 

385 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the region, took possession of the town, its houses, goods, and attrac- 
tive women, and, camping in the city hall and the prefect's office, 
boiled their soup over the archives. For a few brief months before 
their arrival, Ayacucho was the proud capital of Peru. Congress 
held its sessions in the old church of San Augustin cornering on the 
plaza, and for a while money was coined there. 

Local information might have ended with that, but for the fact that 
an ayacuchano who eked out an existence, Santiago knows how, in one 
of the little shops under the portales, was " aficionado " to the history 
of the region. I spent long hours with him, for clients were of scant 
importance compared to his hobby. He was unshakable in his convic- 
tion that the Indian was just as ambitionless and animal-like in his 
habits before the Conquest, as to-day. Ayacucho has a local heroine 
in one Maria Parado de Bellido about whom already strange legends 
have gathered. A chola woman of the middle-class, who could neither 
read nor write, she took a leading part in the revolution against Span- 
ish rule. Having undertaken the delivery of a treasonable letter, 
written at her instigation, she was captured by the Spaniards and, 
swallowing the missive, refused to betray the writer, for which hard- 
headedness she was shot before the broad, central pillar of the Mu- 
nicipalidad. This was the scene of many an execution in colonial 
times. Those condemned to die were kept three days in the arched 
dungeon that forms a corner of the building, " gorged with all spiritual 
and material blessings — peaches and beefsteaks and the like," as my 
informant put it, and then shot. He asserted that in Ayacucho none 
were burned nor otherwise executed by the Inquisition. But the 
statement has not all the earmarks of veracity. Not only is the 
century-faded edifice on the adjoining corner still known as the 
" Church of the Inquisition," but a city whose population never ex- 
ceeded 40,000 that could build the twenty-four large churches and 
countless chapels still existent, to say nothing of the many that have 
disappeared, " just because the priest of each ward cried, ' Come, let 
us build a church ! ' and they came and built it," was not likely to be 
contented without seeing an occasional heretic roasted in the central 
plaza on a gala Sunday afternoon. 

There was one sight which the " authorities " were so bent on my 
visiting and " picturing to the world " that the prefect detailed a soldier 
to accompany me to it. The so-called " Battle of Ayacucho " really 
took place at La Quinua, on the sloping brown mountain-flanks some 
twelve miles to the northeast of the city. From any high place 

386 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

in town the village, backed by its white monument and the dark face 
of Cundurcunca, the " Condor's Nest," is plainly visible. One can 
even make out the highway on which the Spanish veterans zigzagged 
up to the deep quebrada in which La Serna capitulated, almost at the 
very hour that Phillip V in far-off Spain was making him " Duke of 
the Andes " as a reward for his victorious campaign. There was no 
cable in those days. But I knew no way of telling the prefect, 
without insult, that I did not choose to tramp twenty-four thirsty, 
earthquake-cracked miles to gaze upon a plaster monument that I 
could study to my heart's content from where I sat, and I was re- 
duced to the customary strategy of Latin-American intercourse. The 
soldier came to wake me at six — it is the South American way to 
fulfill only those promises one hopes will be forgotten. I greeted him 
with the announcement that I had decided to put off the trip until 
the following week. He showed distinct signs of relief at not having 
to drive his legs, with heavy, unaccustomed shoes on the ends of them, 
all day, and as everything always is postponed in Ayacucho, the de- 
cision caused no surprise. 

" Is there a public library in town ? " I asked a native son. 

" Como no ! " he cried, as if the question were an insult to the " cul- 
ture and progress " for which Ayacucho fancies itself famed. 

Following his directions, I hurried over to the Municipalidad, cheer- 
ful with the prospect of spending a few quiet hours unstared-at among 
its books. For some time I wandered through several refuse-strewn 
patios and deep-shaded corredors of the rambling, one-story building, 
peering into many a room with uneven earth floor, without finding 
anything even mildly resembling a library. At length I stumbled upon 
a chamber marked " Secretaria," in which six men of varying shades 
of color were discussing the coming bull-fight, rolling cigarettes, sleep- 
ing, and otherwise earning their salaries. A long search brought 
to light a ten-inch key, and a procession of the full municipal force 
of Ayacucho escorted me through several more empty, earth-floored 
rooms to a door at the rear of the building. 

" You see," explained the official with the most nearly white collar 
and the longest right to keep his hat on, " we have only just begun to 
form the library, so the catalogue is not yet available nor any of the 
books arranged. However. ..." 

As the time-eaten sign over the door announced that this evidence 
of culture and progress had only been founded in 1877, it was natural 
that it should not yet be set in order. One cannot expect things to be 

387 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

done in a minute in Latin America. The walls of the stoop-shoul- 
dered mud room were almost hidden by books, however, nearly all 
of them bound in ancient parchment or imitations of the same. I 
ran my eyes along them, the six municipal employees grouped in a 
staring semicircle about me. Row after row stretched books in Latin, 
Italian, Spanish, and French, with such titles as, " The Infallibility of 
the Church," by Padre So-and-So, " The Life of Saint Quien Sabe," 
by " A Brother of the Order " ; but nowhere was there one with a 
suggestion of modern utility. 

" This looks much like a priest's library," I remarked, when I had 
read most of the titles. 

" Cabalmente, senor," said the front-rank official. " Exactly ; it was 
given by the holy bishop who died a few years ago. Where are those 
friars who were arranging the books ? " he demanded querulously, 
glaring at his inferiors grouped about us. 

" I think they have not come back from lunch yet," tremulously sug- 
gested one of the five. 

As the dust lay at least an eighth of an inch thick on every book in 
sight, the good friars must have been called to a sumptuous repast 
indeed. 

" Is n't there some book in the collection that will give me something 
of interest about Ayacucho ? " I asked. 

" Ah — er — well, as to that — ah — como no, senor — yes, in- 
deed ! Here you have the five volumes of Bossuet, and — and here 
is the • Imitacion de Cristo ' — very excellent — old parchment, as you 
see — and . . ." 

My slightest finger movement was followed by six pairs of eyes, 
as closely as an " aficionado " of the bull-ring watches those of his 
favorite matador. Had I found anything worth reading, I should 
not have been left in peace to read it. First, because of the excite- 
ment which the sight of a stranger arouses in Ayacucho, trebled by un- 
bounded wonder that any man should be interested in books and 
libraries; second, because every Latin-American knows that any per- 
son left alone for a moment in a library is sure to carry off as many 
books as he can conceal about his person. The most modern volumes 
brought to light by a more careful scrutiny were Racine's works and 
a Spanish edition of Richardson's " Clarissa Harlowe " ; but this last 
I am sure some practical joker had given the good bishop so late in 
life that he had not found time to read and destroy it before he was 
called to whatever reward awaited him. We tiptoed out into the 

388 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONOUISTADORES 

earth-carpeted hallway again, and carefully locked up the dust and 
parchments, as they will no doubt remain until the worthy friars 
come back from lunch. 

Around the corner the cobbled street was blocked by a horse- 
shoeing contest. This is always considered a very serious business in 
the Andes, though the average horse is so small that a real black- 
smith could toss him about at will. A barefoot, half-Indian herrero 
had emerged from his mud dungeon shop, containing a forge from 
Vulcan's time, but by no means the space necessary to admit the 
animal, and stood watching the preparations for his feat with the 
anxious and critical eye of an aviator about to attack the world's 
record. One of the three attendant Indians threw his poncho over 
the head of the chusco and bound its eyes. Then a rope was drawn 
tightly around its neck, with a choking slip-noose about its nose, an 
Indian clinging desperately to the end of it as long as the contest 
lasted. Next, a llama-hair lassoo was bound to the animal's nigh 
front fetlock and the foot hoisted by another attendant on the off 
side, who used the back of the trussed-up brute as a pulley. A third 
Indian held the foot by hand. When all was ready, the valorous 
blacksmith sneaked up and pared the hoof a bit with an instrument 
much like a small, sharp, shovel with a long handle — pared it very 
imperfectly, as is the way of Andean blacksmiths, leaving so much of 
the toe that the animal was in constant danger of having an ankle 
broken on some rough-and-tumble trail. Then he hunted up a cold 
horseshoe, without caulk, just as it came from the hardware store 
that had imported it from the; United States — for the Andean black- 
smith never heats a shoe, much less alters it — and laid it gingerly 
on the hoof. Evidently, to the inexact eye of the herrero, it fitted. 
He clawed around among the cobbles and refuse of the street, where his 
tools lay strewn and scattered, until he found several hand-forged 
horseshoe nails of the style in vogue in our own land before the Civil 
War, and standing afar off", like a man willing to risk his life to do 
his duty, yet not to risk it beyond reason, started one of the nails with 
a Stone-Age hammer. Suddenly the foot twitched. The blacksmith 
sprang backward a long yard, with blanched countenance, the foot- 
holder fled, and the two remaining Indians cried out in startled 
Quichua, while clinging to the far ends of their ropes. Bit by bit the 
herrero crept up again and took to driving the nails at long range, as 
if he were mashing the head of a venomous snake, poised on his toes, 
ready to spring away at the slightest sign of life in the blindfolded 

389 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

animal. Gradually the eight nails were driven, not without several 
repetitions of the blanching fright, and the operation repeated with 
the other hoofs. Finally the blacksmith manoevered to positions in 
which he could twist off and crudely clinch the protruding nail-points, 
rubbed a rasp once or twice over them, and the perilous job was done. 
The fiery steed was relieved of the blinding poncho, the Indians went 
to restore their nerves with a copita of pisco, and the blacksmith, col- 
lecting fifteen cents a shoe from the owner of the animal, shut up shop 
forthwith, as if he had risked his life enough for one day. 

The milking of a cow is a no less serious business in the Andes, 
and requires as large a force. First the cow must be captured and 
confined in a corral overnight. Calves are never weaned, but are 
kept away from the mothers until the hour of milking. As each 
cow's turn comes, its calf is freed for a moment, then dragged away 
by main force, and either tied to the mother's front leg, or held by a 
boy close enough to deceive the animal into fancying she is feeding 
her own offspring. Another youth, after tying her hind legs to- 
gether at the ankles, clings to a rope about her neck, a third assistant 
holds a socobe, or shallow gourd-bowl, under the udder, and a woman 

— why it must always be a woman I know not, but the fact remains 

— squats on her heels at arm's length on the opposite side of the ani- 
mal, and falls to milking with much the same attentive regard for her 
welfare as the blacksmith. As often as the pint-measure is filled, the 
milk is poured into a vessel outside the fence or one in the hands of 
a waiting purchaser. The woman or one of the boys laps up the few 
drops left in the socobe, and the task continues until two teats are 
stripped. The two remaining belong by ancient custom to the calf. 
In view of the fact that cows are milked at most once a day, and often 
at irregular or broken intervals, it is not strange that milk is rare, and 
butter unknown, even on large haciendas well stocked with cattle. 

Saturday is beggar's day in Ayacucho, as in most towns of South 
America. From morning till night a constant procession of disease 
and decrepitude comes whining by the shops, so endless in its appeals 
that the town has adopted a custom similar to the merchants of India 
with their bowls of cozvries, or sea-shells. On Saturday morning each 
shopkeeper opens a package of large needles, three to four inches 
long, one of which he bestows upon each beggar who presents him- 
self. The mendicant mumbles a " Dios pagarasunqui," and shuffles 
on to the next doorway. When he has collected ten or twelve needles, 
if he be so lucky, he sells them to certain dealers for a medio (2 l / 2 

390 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

cents), on which, apparently, he lives until the next Saturday. In 
some parts of Peru the Indians wear a large needle in their hat- 
bands, evidently as a weapon of defense, but those of Ayacucho seem 
to have no practical use, except as legal tender. Some time during 
the ensuing week the purchasers sell them back to the shopkeepers, 
Saturday sees them again distributed, and so they go on indefinitely 
around the circle. 

Among other things of long ago Ayacucho used to have a uni- 
versity. To-day her highest institution of learning is the Colegio 
Nacional de San Roman, corresponding to our high schools — chiefly 
in the impudence of its pupils. It was for the purpose of supplying 
this institution with an athletic field — incongruous possession it 
seemed in this community — that a " benefit " bull-fight was perpe- 
trated on the Sunday of my stay. The cuadrilla, headed by " Cur- 
rito " and " Ramito " of Sevilla, my fellow-sufferers at the hotel, were 
the same simple-hearted, modest fellows, with a noisy joy in life, 
that I had found most of their fellows in Spain. Both the principals 
had come over with Posadas, one of the friends of my Spanish 
journey, who had returned a year later only to be killed by a " Miura," 
while these his companions remained to eke out a livelihood in Chile, 
Peru, and Bolivia. 

All the gente decente of Ayacucho and their wives, in full powder, 
were on hand when the gala corrida began. We of the elite occu- 
pied the " palcos," or boxes — several rows of chairs shaded by a faded 
strip of canvas, up on the roof of the ancient colegio, the aged red 
tiles of which were trodden to powder underfoot. The "ring" in 
the patio below, fenced by poles tied to uprights and other rustic make- 
shifts, was surrounded by the excited gente del pueblo. The scene was 
backed by a massive, old, crumbling church — it would have been hard 
to avoid such a backing in Ayacucho — and a view of most of the 
town sprinkled away through its half-green valley, Rasuillca, the snow- 
clad, and the black range of Cundurcunca, with its white battle monu- 
ment and its highway zigzagging away over into the great Amazonian 
montana beyond as plainly visible as if they stood a bare mile away. 
The exciting national sport of Spain degenerates at best to a dismal 
pastime in the new world. The imported toreros were well enough, 
but the bulls of the Andes leave much to be desired. Even dogs lose 
their aggressiveness in high altitudes, it is said. At any rate, the 
animals gathered for the occasion on the broad pampas at the foot of 
Cundurcunca could seldom be roused to face the toreros, and spent 

391 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

their efforts chiefly in racing around the " ring " in vain efforts to 
escape, until they were at length tortured out of existence. In fact, 
about all the gala corrida amounted to was the substitution of these 
heroes from across the seas for the native butchers accustomed to 
prepare Ayachucho's weekly meat supply. As they fell, the animals 
were dragged out and cut up within full sight of the crowd, the meat 
in some cases being raffled off to the ticket-holders of the sol. It was 
the dragging-out that the gathering hooted most vociferously. Pica- 
dores and horses are rarely in evidence in the bull-fights of Spanish- 
America, but the program had featured the promise of removing the 
carcasses from the ring " al estilo de Espafia," that is, by gaily capari- 
soned mules. It was this new evidence of culture and progress that 
much of Ayacucho had come to see. But when the first victim 
sprawled in the dust, the mules were missing, and the customary gang 
of Indians crawled through the barrier and, tugging at its tail and 
legs, and raising clouds of dust that half-concealed their activities, 
gradually removed the fallen brute in the time-honored Andean 
manner. 

As the supply of meat promised to exceed the demand, the fifth and 
sixth bulls were merely decorated with banderillas and sent back to 
the corral. Then a pair of two-year-old novillos were turned over to 
the " aficionados." A dozen youths of the " best families " descended 
into the " ring," in their most impressive Sunday garb and with capotes 
borrowed from the toreros, and demonstrated their own skill as bull- 
fighters. A Dr. Fulano, in private life a civil engineer, at least on his 
visiting-card, killed the first of the frightened animals in admirable 
style, and was hailed by his delighted fellow-townsmen the king of 
matadores. But dusk had fallen before the amateurs had effectively 
wounded the other, and the massed population gradually radiated 
homeward and subsided into its humdrum weekly existence. 

I have come near overlooking the most striking thing in Ayacucho, 
— the head-dress of its women. In the Andes fashions change not 
with time, but with place. In Inca days each district had its own dis- 
tinctive garb, or at least head-gear, a custom which was strictly en- 
forced in colonial times, in order that Indians belonging to one province 
might not escape compulsory labor by going to another. What a con- 
venience it would be in our own land if we could recognize each man's 
place of birth by the shape or color of his derby! The bonnets of 
Ayacucho are hard to believe. Though I had been duly warned in 
advance, the first glimpse of an ayacuchana caught me unawares. I 

392 




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A religious procession in the main square of Ayaeucho. When the leading figure reached 

certain points, an old Indian set off elaborate pieces of fireworks, and as 

the smoke cleared away scores of urchins dashed in to fight 

with the Indian and one another for the frame-work 




A gala Sunday in the improvised "bullring" of Ayaeucho, in the patio of the Colegio, or 

high school, for the benefit of which the corrida was given. The chief 

toreros are Spanish, and the mountain bulls are at best 

somewhat lacking in ferocity 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

fancied she was carrying home some purchase on her head. When 
others like her began to appear from all directions, however, I recalled 
to what lengths fair woman will go to keep in fashion. The wildest 
nightmares perpetrated by the milliners of more familiar lands by no 
means come so perilously near reducing the mere male beholder to 
hysterics as this, which at first sight gives a suggestion of that thrill the 
traveler to Mars might experience at coming suddenly face to face with 
something totally new and unprecedented. The rank and file of Aya- 
cucho women wear on their heads a blanket, gay in hue and large 
enough to serve as a bedspread, nicely folded in triangular form, with 
one sharp corner protruding over the face. Each one is distinct in 
color, with an embroidered border, and is usually lined with silk. 
Even the half -Indian women from the suburbs, driving to market 
donkeys all but hidden under loads of alfalfa — each burden protected 
from its hungry carrier by a large wooden gag in the animal's mouth — 
balance this contraption on their heads through all their labors. No 
one in Ayacucho could tell me the origin of so absurd a fashion, though 
all were agreed it had been in vogue a very long time ; nor had any of 
them ever developed enough curiosity to enquire, except the prefect, a 
newcomer in this region, who had investigated in vain. 

Anchorena, the piano importer, had promised on his caballero honor 
to have Chusquito back in the hotel patio on Sunday night, that I 
might continue my journey at dawn. Knowing only too well the 
nebulous stuff of which Latin-American promises are made, I set out 
on Saturday to jog his memory. The houses of Ayacucho are not 
nuhibered, but the thumping of a piano in the throes of amateur tuning 
easily guided me to the lawyer's dwelling. Surrounded by the gaudily 
overdecorated magnificence of his parlor, he laughed at my absurd 
misgivings and repeated his " palabra de caballero." Yet when night 
fell on Sunday, no horse had appeared. I hurried back to the Ancho- 
rena residence. The lawyer received me with that complacent indif- 
ference to his plighted word, without even an attempt to excuse him- 
self, which is common to his race. As in the days of the Conquest, 
when betrayal was an everyday affair, the word of the most important 
resident of the Andes is not worth the breath required to utter it. Most 
annoying of all, they treat any protest against their devotion to 
manana as a gringo weakness they must put up with, but to which they 
hope never to fall victims themselves. Even as they listen, a sneaking 
smile lurks just behind their solemn countenances, as if they were 
hearing the plaints of a querulous child. Were we in this world 

393 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

merely to see how easily we could drift through it, the Andean point 
of view would be superb ; to those of us burdened with the notion that 
we are here to get some little thing done, it is maddening. 

" Team ess mo-nay, eh ? " squeaked the lawyer, with a condescend- 
ing smirk. " If the horse does not arrive to-night, perhaps it will come 
to-morrow ; or if not, what is the difference whether you go to-morrow, 
or the day after ? " 

" The difference, my friend, between an American and a Latin- 
American," I could not refrain from replying, " and may it ever grow 
wider." 

Thus, when I would gladly have added Ayacucho to my past, I found 
myself helpless to advance, for the lawyer would not even direct me 
to his estate, that I might bring the animal myself. The next after- 
noon an Indian arrived from the hacienda — with the wrong horse. 
I joined the bull-fighters, strolling about town with the Monday lan- 
guor customary to their profession, and whiled away several more 
funereal hours. Then at dusk I returned to the hotel, to find Chus- 
quito lounging against a pillar in front of my door, looking not an 
inch rounder for all the " very rich feed " with which the hacienda 
was reputed to abound. The way he fell upon a bundle of alfalfa, 
bought of the Indian woman and girl who sleep on the cobblestones 
of Santo Domingo plaza beside a heap of it, suggested that he had 
spent the week grazing on bare ground. Yet the Indian who brought 
him had presented an exorbitant bill for his accommodation from the 
sister of the man who had implored the honor of giving him free pas- 
ture on his own hacienda. 

I was awake at four — for religious reasons — and by the time the 
birds in the trees began to twitter we had left the acknowledged ceme- 
tery of Dead Man's Corner behind, and were climbing away toward 
the sunrise. The road, true to its Latin-American environment, left 
town with great enthusiasm, but soon petered out to a wearisome 
trail. Of several villages of Indians noted for their passive resistance 
to all the demands of the traveler, the most typical was Ocros. We 
came out far above it one morning, on the lofty crest of a range from 
which the trail pitched for a time blindly down into a vast sea of mist 
hiding all the unknown world before us. Bit by bit vast rocks loomed 
up out of the fog, like black, misshapen giants ; then huts appeared 
once more, with here and there an Indian plowing a bit of hillside with 
a wooden stick and a pair of oxen he seemed in constant peril of sud- 
denly losing down the sheer mountain-side. Then at last the mist 

394 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

cleared and disclosed, cramped in its narrow vale far below among 
dwarf trees, a town which rose gradually up to us, and at noon, after 
all but losing Chusquito and my other worldly belongings through a 
dirt-and-branch bridge that showed no sign of having been condemned 
until we were upon it, I halted at the hut of the gobernador. He was 
out — which probably meant that he was hiding in one of the half- 
dozen ancient mud structures that surrounded his corral — and his 
females were taciturn. I displayed my government order and asked to 
have food prepared. 

" Manam cancha," mumbled one of the women, all of whom kept 
silently and impassively at work with their primitive spindles. 

" I must have fodder for the animalito," I protested. 

" Manam cancha," came the monotonous answer again, with that in- 
flection peculiar to the Andean Indian, which seems to say, " There 
isn't any; but there might be if I felt like going to get it." I should 
have preferred hunger to a scene, but I declined to allow anyone out 
of mere apathy to starve Chusquito. 

" Manam cancha, eh ? " I cried, snatching the grass roof off a 
chicken-coop and tossing it before the animal. Sentimentalists to the 
contrary notwithstanding, the surest way to impress an Andean Indian 
is to appeal to force. Gradually the most democratic traveler learns 
to adopt the native habit of addressing him as " tu," and to treat him 
like the balky domestic animal he so closely resembles. I picked up a 
boy from behind the mud wall surrounding the females, and thrust- 
ing a coin upon him, ordered him to go and buy eggs. Once the 
traveler can force money into an Indian's possession, his prospects of 
provisions brighten, for it is as easy for the latter to produce them as to 
come and return the coin. The eggs were soon forthcoming and, 
taking possession of a table under the projecting roof and marching 
into the kitchen for water, I lighted my rum-burner and fell to pre- 
paring a meal. By the time I had effectively demonstrated my im- 
portance, the same woman who had " manam cancha-ed " me in the 
beginning came to say that if I would give her a medio she would buy 
fodder; and a few moments later she returned, carrying in her own 
arms a huge bundle of chala, or dry cornstalks, over which Chusquito 
struggled during the rest of our stay in competition with the family 
calf, pigs, and chickens. 

It was probably as much out of a desire to inspect my cooking outfit 
as fear for her chicken-coops that had won me attendance. Behind 
the mask that hides his emotions the Indian of the Andes is filled with 

395 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

curiosity. There runs an Andean anecdote that well illustrates this 
characteristic. One of their own race, who had served in the army 
and learned other things without forgetting the ways of his own 
people, came at night to an Indian hut and requested lodging. When 
this was granted in the customary manner — merely by not being re- 
fused — he asked for food. 

" Manam cancha," came the expected reply. 

" Well, sell me something and I will cook for myself." 

" Manam cancha." 

The soldier was well aware that there were plenty of supplies hid- 
den away in the hut. He knew, also, the Indian temperament. 

" Well, I suppose I '11 have to get along on a chupe de guijarros," 
he sighed, using Spanish to make his speech more impressive. 

" A stone soup ! " murmured the household, betrayed by astonish- 
ment into understanding a tongue they pretended not to know. 

" Yes, it is what we use in the army when there is nothing better." 

He wandered down to the mountain stream below the hut and, re- 
turning with a dozen large smooth pebbles, washed them carefully, and 
laid them out on his bundle. 

" You won't mind lending me an olla ? " he murmured to the wall 
of expressionless faces about him. 

A woman brought the kettle in silence. The soldier, humming a 
barrack-room ballad, half-filled the pot with water, set it over the fire, 
dropped in the stones one by one, and squatted on his heels with a 
sigh of contentment. By and by he borrowed a wooden spoon and 
tasted the concoction from time to time, throwing the residue back 
into the kettle in approved Andean fashion. 

"You don't happen to have a bit of salt?" he murmured, after a 
time, to the family now gathered close around him watching this pos- 
sible miracle silently but intently. 

" Cachi? That we have," said the woman, handing him a piece of 
purple rock, which he beat up and sprinkled into the now steaming pot. 

" Too bad I have n't a few potatoes to put in," he droned, as if to 
himself, " it would help the flavor." 

The old woman shambled away into the darkness of a far corner, 
and came back some time later to thrust silently toward him a handful 
of small potatoes, her eyes glued on the miraculous pot. When these 
were about half-boiled the soldier again broke off his song to murmur : 

" This is going to be one of the finest chupes de guijarros I 've ever 
made. All it lacks now is a bit of aji to give it life." 

396 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

The old woman muttered something to one of the ragged girls beside 
her, and the latter went to dig two red peppers out of the thatch. 

" A piece of cabbage would make it perfect," sighed the soldier. 

The Indians, too engrossed in the production of a stone soup, and too 
slow of mind to have caught up yet with the course of events, brought 
to light a small cabbage. By this time they were so consumed with 
curiosity that the old man asked innocently : 

" But do you make a stone soup without meat ? " 

" Ah, to be sure, a strip of charqui always improves it," replied the 
soldier indifferently, " but . . ." 

A girl was sent to fetch a sheet of sun-dried beef, which the former 
conscript cut up slowly and dropped bit by bit into the now savory- 
smelling chupe. A half-hour later he lifted the kettle off the fire, the 
old woman handed him a gourd plate, and some cold boiled yuca as 
bread, and having given half of it to the family, he ate the stone soup 
with great relish — all except the dozen smooth, round stones at the 
bottom of the olla. 

All that afternoon we slipped and slid down a half -perpendicular 
stone-quarry, that bruised my toes if not Chusquito's, into a repulsive 
molle- and cactus-grown desert in which a tropical sun blazed with 
homicidal intensity. No wonder its blistering rays faded the made-in- 
Germany cloth of my Ayacucho-tailored breeches, when it bleached 
even Chusquito's coat to a pale, reddish yellow. Had I not come upon 
an isolated hut and a gourdful of chicha de jora just when I did, it is 
by no means certain that I should not have perished of thirst before 
the day was done. The "Hacienda Pa jo nal," in the valley of the 
Pampas river where sunset overtook us, was in charge of a white and 
cultured woman engaged in the inviting occupation of dealing out to 
half -drunken Indians the concentrated sugar-cane juice of a large 
hogshead in the liquor room. The husband, who loomed up through 
the tropical twilight, was the graduate of an American agricultural 
college; but the hacienda, under charge of his Quichua-speaking 
mayordomo, was farmed in the same backward manner as in the times 
of the Incas, without even their energy, and his foreign training had 
given him no inkling of the proper occupation for wives. Nor did he 
give any evidence of ability to speak English. After the patriarchial 
supper around a long, rough-hewn table, he set in motion a large phono- 
graph, and we heard not only the best opera stars of the day, but such 
exotic selections as " The Old Gray Bonnet," and a tale of love and 
moonlight along the Wabash. A veritable crowd of arrieros and low- 

397 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

caste native travelers, who had made this their night's stopping place, 
and the uncouth Indian laborers of the hacienda, gathered on the edge 
of the darkness and stood like statues as long as the entertainment 
lasted. Evidently they were amused, or they would not have re- 
mained; but the absolute stoniness of their expression, without the 
faintest outward evidence of pleasure, would have brought dismay to 
a living entertainer. We had dropped again into a genuine tierra 
caliente, warm as the Cauca valley, where tiny gnats decorated my skin 
with an annoyance that was to last for days to come; and though I 
was favored with the guest-room all important Peruvian haciendas pro- 
vide for travelers, the corredor outside my door, and all the neigh- 
boring patios and corrals was strewn with Indians of both sexes, 
stretched out among their bales and trappings. 

An hour or more next morning along the flat river-bottom planted 
with sugar-cane brought us to one of those swaying bridges over a 
roaring stream compressed between precipitous rock-walls, so numer- 
ous in the time of the Incas. But instead of woven willow withes, it 
was supported by cables and, as if to recall the provident Incas by 
contrast, was sadly in need of the repair that had just begun. Chus- 
quito crossed the precarious contraption only under protest, after the 
application of more than moral suasion, and on the slanting and broken 
cross-slats I kept my own footing with difficulty. Had he been more 
than a boy's size horse, we should have been held up at the edge of 
the gorge for days, until the languid workmen finished their task. We 
were now in the department of Apurimac. Some miles further along 
the river, through a sandy wilderness of organ-cactus noisy with 
flocks of screaming green parrots, the trail struck upward on the 
famous ascent of Bombon. It was another of those infernally stony, 
endless, blazing, absolutely waterless climbs that must be endured 
wherever a river has cut its way deep into the Andes, requiring a day 
of laborious toil to advance a few miles across a chasm that might 
almost be bridged. Even Chusquito seemed ready to stretch out on 
his back when at last we reached the summit, the lofty plateau again 
spreading away cool and inviting before us. 

In Chincheros the gobernador attempted at first to deny the honor, 
but being caught in the act, as it were, accepted the situation with 
good grace, as became a caballero of considerable Spanish ancestry. 
In the black shale of his back corredor all the local " authorities " were 
gathered about a long table that groaned as with the gout each time any 
of its legs was subjected to undue weight, their state papers, seals, and 

398 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

ink-horns, and a goodly array of large ill-scented bottles spread 
out before them. When he had spelled out my papers, the gobernador 
invited me to make the veranda my home as long as I chose to grace 
Chincheros with my gnat-bitten countenance, and I spent what re- 
mained of the day amid a mixture of chicha, pisco, and justice. A 
fully sober person was not to be expected at that hour in Peru, but the 
" authorities " were still sufficiently aware of the dignity of their 
position to whisk the bottles out of sight when I prepared to photograph 
the group. That an andarin should not present a book for their 
seals and signatures they took as a slight, and I was forced to submit 
several pages of my note-book to their official decoration. During all 
the rest of the afternoon Indians and half-Indians came slinking in 
before the authoritative crowd, one of whom was a notary public, to 
mumble their petitions or complaints with many a cringing " tayta- 
tayta," and the air of slaves before ill-tempered masters. The other- 
wise subservient proceedings were broken once by a wordy passage-at- 
arms between the gobernador and an aged caballero dressed in rags 
and pride, who bade a formal farewell to the women of the family and 
other officials, but left without the customary handshake with the 
gobernador, marking this as the most serious quarrel I had yet wit- 
nessed in South America. When the business of the day was over, 
the mellow-conditioned " authorities " all joined in a game of 
" quoits," with silver soles in place of horseshoes, to determine which 
of them should supply the wine that topped off the festivities. The 
family supper was served on the table so recently occupied by the 
affairs of justice, and I spread my bed on two of the benches that had 
sustained the weight of the august judges. Here and there on the 
mud floor of the court-room an Indian slept, curled up like a contented 
yellow dog on a bundle of rags or corn-stalks. 

I had assigned to the long, hard day across the great range beyond 
Chincheros the experience of chewing coca, said to sustain the Andean 
Indian on his laborious journeyings. As we undulated across the 
barren, brown top of the world, I began feeding myself leaf by leaf, 
adhering strictly to the accepted rules of this indigenous sport, until 
I had formed a bulging cud in my right cheek — the left is also per- 
mitted by the rules. The taste was not unlike that of dry hay. Then 
I bit off several nibbles of lime from the burnt stone I had bought in 
the market of Huancayo and, mixing it with the leaves, began to chew. 
The only sensation I was clearly aware of was that the lime burned 
my gums atrociously, as it would have done had the coca leaf never 

399 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

been discovered. I am not sure that I did not feel a slight increase in 
exhilaration that caused me to lift my feet a trifle faster ; but this may 
easily have been due to the beauty of the scene that stretched to 
infinity on every hand, for even Chusquito seemed inspired to bestir 
his dainty hoofs with more than his accustomed sprightliness. 

The hazy valley of the Pampas river with its biting gnats had dis- 
appeared into the past, and only the bare, brown world spread before 
us to a far distant horizon that seemed to move forward as we ad- 
vanced. Small wonder the natives were astonished that I kept the 
road. I could not but be surprised myself that instinct and the slight 
assistance of my pocket-compass guided me aright across this deathly- 
still, unpeopled mountain-top, where the traveler must constantly 
watch the faintly marked path, lest it take advantage of the briefest in- 
attention to dodge from under his feet and leave him hopelessly 
stranded high up on a dreary puna trackless as the sea itself. On 
these shelterless heights it was easy to understand why each succeed- 
ing town had watched my departure with gaping mouths, and that the 
boldest inhabitants had cried out: " Nosotros, aunque hijos del pais, 
no nos aventuremos hasta el Cuzco sin guia ! — Even we, sons of the 
country, would not adventure ourselves to Cuzco without a guide ! " 

But luck was with me. The dull-yellow world began to subside at 
last, and we came out far above a long, winding valley, in the dim end 
of which I could make out a green speck that was evidently that very 
Andahuaylas toward which we were headed. Far away, in the same 
direction which I must follow to reach the Navel of the Inca Empire, 
were tooth-shaped peaks, slightly snowclad, hung high in the sky, and 
below, and about, and beyond them to the ends of the earth, the sugges- 
tion, rather than the actual sight, of such a labyrinth of ranges as only 
the disordered imagination seemed capable of creating. We began to 
go down and forever down, so swiftly that we could have kicked each 
other in our disgust, now slipping and stumbling along toboggans of 
loose stones, now picking our way step by step down natural rock 
stairs, then descending across steep meadows of mountain grass on 
which Chusquito, with his caulkless shoes, gave a ludicrous suggestion 
of some silly fellow attempting to skate on all fours. At length the 
slope moderated its pace and took on a thin garb of trees and vegeta- 
tion, the mountain-tops on which we had been walking a bare two 
hours before now towering into the sky above. Below the village of 
Moyabamba, so renowned for its horse-stealing that we lost no time in 
leaving it behind us, the valley narrowed to a gorge, in which our 

400 




A familiar sight in the Andes, — a recently butchered beef hung in sheets along the 

clothes-line to sun-dry into charqui, the soleleather-like imitation of food 

on which the Andean traveler is often forced to subsist 




A typical "bed" in the guest-room provided for travelers by many Peruvian hacendados, — 

to wit: a stone or adobe divan on which the traveler may spread whatever bedding 

he brings with him. Note my alforjas, kitchenette, and bottle of fuel. An 

auto-picture taken by pinning a flash sheet on the opposite wall 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

progress was blocked by a mule-train of lea wine. I fell in with the 
chief arriero at the rear, and plodded with him in the cloud of dust 
rising behind the shuffling mules like the mists of the morning from 
some seaside valley. Each of the animals bore two kegs of wine 
nicely balanced on his sawbuck-shaped pack-saddle, a total weight of 
250 pounds. The journey from lea to Andahuaylas averaged from 
three weeks to a month, the entire cost of transportation about $7.50 
for each animal. In the morning, horsemen and pedestrians formed 
an almost unbroken procession along the rich and thickly inhabited 
valley of the little Chumbau river, for all the league from Talavera to 
the straggling town of Andahuaylas. 

Manuel Richter, addressee of my letter, kept a little general-store 
on a corner of the plaza. Chusquito and I waited in the streak of 
shade before his shop until he had spelled out the missive with Teu- 
tonic deliberation, in marked contrast to the Latin-American quick- 
ness of welcome, which almost as quickly explodes into thin air. Our 
new host had first emigrated forty years before from Poland to New 
York, where he had lived several months in " Ghe-r-reen Schtreet," a 
fact he never lost an opportunity to mention, evidently under the im- 
pression that it was still the aristocratic center of the city. During that 
time he had worked in a store " way uptown in Oonion Sqvare." He 
still boasted a brother in the koscher district of Harlem, but for some 
reason that does not apply to most of his race he had drifted on to 
Peru and become a true Peruvian, even to taking off his hat when a 
tin Virgin passed in the street. Yet we spoke German together. He 
seemed to prefer it to Spanish, even after half a lifetime in the Andes 
and despite a Peruvian wife and half a dozen children entirely ig- 
norant of the former tongue. 

The Richter meals were \ more than substantial, and his family 
bubbled over with kind-heartedness. But he was forced to share the 
honor of a guest from far-off America del Norte with one Da Pozzo, 
who dwelt in solitary, topsyturvy state in an ancient, two-story ruin 
on a knoll across the prattling Chumbau. He was a Venetian on the 
sadder side of forty, once an architect of high standing, who had laid 
out more than one Plaza de Armas in Peru and Bolivia. Several 
turns of the wheel of fate in the wrong direction, among them a Peru- 
vian wife, the confessional, and the fiery waters that partly drown 
such memories, had reduced his ambition to a low level and his 
income to what may be picked up by the building of mud houses in 
these drowsy towns of the interior. In his customary condition he 

401 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

was maudlinly affectionate, to the point of making even my cheeks 
the target of his bewhiskered kisses, and vociferous in his assertion 
that he was a " mason " and a hater of priests in all lands and lan- 
guages. But what mattered all this, or the fact that his junk-strewn 
ruin boasted only one wooden-floored bed, and that the rotting old bal- 
cony seemed always on the point of dropping from under one? For 
it overlooked splendid groves and rows of the slender, blue-black euca- 
lyptus where birds sang merrily, as well as the brown flanks of the 
Andes rolling up out of both sides and ends of a valley enlivened by a 
constant going and coming of Indians along its broad roadway. Then, 
too, there was rich alfalfa on which Chusquito might gorge himself 
at no other expense than an occasional medio to the Indian boy as- 
signed the task of cutting it — " that he have affection for you and 
your horse." 

Andahuaylas is really nothing but an example of how life may be 
made a perennial pastime, scattered almost thickly along the entire two 
leagues from Talavera to San Jeronimo. Yet its situation and climate 
give it a charm peculiarly its own, and it would be hard to imagine a 
better place in which to drift through life — as its inhabitants seem to 
recognize. Though the long valley is extremely fertile, it produces 
little. The Indians of more or less full blood that make up the bulk 
of the population will not work ; the " white " man cannot, lest he for- 
ever lose his precious caste. The laziest American laborer known to 
charity bureaus will do more and better work in an hour, unwatched, 
than the liveliest Indian of Andahuaylas in a day, with a boss stand- 
ing over him. Without in the least hurrying I could descend from 
the upper story of our ruin to the river, return with a pail of water, 
complete my toilet and throw out the water, before the Indian boy 
whose only duty in life was to attend me would, if called, appear from 
his seat directly below my balcony to get the pail — which he would 
smash before he got back, if there was any possible way of doing so, 
and into which he would certainly manage to get some sort of filth, if 
he had to pick it up and throw it in. The gente lay the blame of this 
condition on the escuelas Hscales, the free government-schools, com- 
plaining that " there is no longer service, for as soon as the cholo has 
been to school, he wants to be a person." " Faltan brazos — arms are 
lacking," they wail, gazing across the all but uncultivated valley; yet 
not one of them notices the two hanging idly at his own sides. A 
shower of medios failed to win from the Indian boy an affection suffi- 
cient to keep Chusquito from starvation. I obtained permission to tie 

402 



THE ROUTE OF THE CONQUISTADORES 

the animal in a corner of the fat alfalfa field that would not come to 
him, and all day long I could see him across the little river, a contented 
dot of red against the deep green background of the field from which 
he never raised his head the whole day through. 

Yet the products of the valley are cheap enough, when they exist. 
Eggs were five cents a dozen ; one morning an Indian who needed the 
money came to the ruin to offer me eight for a medio (2 cents). 
Four liters of milk might be had for 7 cents. But let the harassed 
American householder pause a moment and reflect, before he sells his 
chattels and hurries down to Andahuaylas. To obtain those four liters 
one must take a pail and wander several miles along the valley at about 
nine in the morning, wait around some hacienda corral where the 
Indians have concluded not to abandon the daily milking, and never 
get home before noon. The " best families " have a special milk-serv- 
ant who does nothing else — and frequently not even that — than go 
milk hunting ; and on an average he is robbed on his way home of the 
contents of his pail about every third morning, by some group of 
Indians who come upon him out of sight of any member of the gente 
class. 

There is a type of " white " Indian in the Andahuaylas valley, ap- 
parently without admixture of European blood, yet with a very light 
skin and delicate pink cheeks. In the color of their garments they 
nearly rival those of Quito. The heavy woolen socks and hairy san- 
dals of more lofty regions are unknown, and the barefoot patter again 
reigns supreme. In manner the aboriginal is cringing and timorous, 
yet if the word of the shod minority was trustworthy, he has more than 
once been known to sneak up on a sleeping gringo and mash his head 
with a rock. Nor will he squeal " on one of his own race, even 
when put to the torture. 

In the wilderness of weeds that passed for the local cemetery I came 
upon three Indians digging a child's grave. One muscular loafer stood 
less than waist-deep in the hole, scratching into a blanket spread out at 
his feet a bit of dust, with a hoe Adam might have thrown away in 
disgust during the first week of his existence, before he invented a 
better one. To corners of the blanket were tied ropes, by which a pair 
of equally muscular Indians standing on the ground above hauled up 
every ten minutes or so nearly a shovelful of earth. Of course, at 
" coca time," or a dog-fight, or the passing of a drunken man, a for- 
eigner, a bird, or a milk-pail, they paused from their strenuous labors 
a half-hour or so to stare after the attraction. At least half the time 

403 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

left they spent in bandying a skull and a pair of thigh bones back and 
forth between themselves and a pair of Indian women lounging in the 
grass nearby. 

In the church forming one side of the plaza the chief among many 
absurdities testifying to the local absence of a sense of humor were 
the figures in the main side-chapel. These were life-size statues of 
Christ and the Virgin, the former in a sort of " precieux " gown and 
a broad-brimmed red hat with a pink band, the latter in a still broader 
blue one, giving the pair a ludicrous resemblance to the " shepherds " 
into which the nobles of the French court of two centuries ago used to 
disguise themselves, an impression increased by the cross between a 
golf-stick and a back-of-the-scenes hook carried by the Cristo. Yet 
the simple Indians pattered in all through the day to kneel and gaze 
with a beatified expression, in which there was not the shadow of a 
smile, at these absurd figures, no doubt considering them the last word 
in beauty. 

When all is said and done, there is a subtle, lazy charm about the 
valley of Andahuaylas that holds the traveler long after he should 
have moved on. Sometimes, as the placid days drifted smoothly by, 
one caught the native point of view, and regretted the intrusion of 
strenuous gringo activity in the midst of nature's and man's repose; 
a realization that we of the North do much which is not much even 
when we get it done. Here one could lie in perfect contentment and 
watch the road looping away out of the valley over a sunlit hill, with- 
out feeling too strong for resistance the itch to be off. Yet in the end 
the only sure means of enjoying an Andean range is to know that 
some day one is going to tramp away into it, to follow the trail that 
shoulders its way mysteriously off through those shaded valleys and 
rugged quebradas, beckoning one toward another and a new world 
beyond. 



404 




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CHAPTER XVI 

THE CITY OF THE SUN 

I GREW suddenly tired of Andahuaylas one afternoon, and sunrise 
next morning found me driving Chusquito over the neighboring 
divide. We had turned aside from the direct route to Abancay, 
following the valley of the Chumbau, for the least we could do for our 
recent hosts was to carry their greetings to an isolated compadre. 
His " civilized hacienda " sloped up from the shore of a beautiful 
mountain lake some twenty miles in circumference, deep-blue as some 
immense emerald, with half-cultivated mountain-flanks rising all 
about it, and a village tucked away in one corner. But, as so often in 
the high Andes, its entire shore was bordered with slime and reeds 
that made access almost impossible. Mine host shouldered his fowl- 
ing-piece and easily provided a brace of ducks for the evening meal ; 
but he refused vociferously to swim, and watched my preparations 
with patent misgiving. I succeeded in finding an entrance, and took 
a header into the dense-blue, seemingly bottomless immensity of icy 
water, to the vast astonishment of all the Indian shepherds, male and 
female, who live out their lives among their flocks on the edge of this 
magnificent body of water without ever washing a foot in it, to say 
nothing of contriving a boat. The lake is said to be famous for its 
floating islands, that blow back and forth across it with cattle grazing 
serenely upon them; but it was my luck to find even this Andean 
invention out of order and no longer " functioning." 

My lake-side host was of rare adaptability for a Latin-American, 
and of no slight mechanical ability. He not only had a real flour-mill, 
but washed his wheat before grinding it ! This removes him at once 
and forever from the " Spig " class. His own electric plant furnished 
the most satisfactory light I had read by since leaving Lima; a tele- 
phone connected him with the outside world — though this ultra- 
modern contrivance was not yet considered a fitting messenger for the 
greetings of his compadres in Andahuaylas. With the advertisement 
of a $200 " Singola " as a model, he had fitted his small phonograph 
into a homemade cedar box, making it an instrument quite equal both 

405 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

in tone and appearance to that in the catalogue. Only he who knows 
how devoid of mechanical ability is the average Latin-American can 
realize how vastly this feat lifted the lake-side hacendado above his 
fellows. 

I had half-skirted the lake and crossed a stony range next day when, 
near noon, in a collection of huts called Pincos, at the bottom of a 
mighty quebrada, I caught sight of something I had never before seen 
in South America. It was a white boy, perhaps twelve years old, 
wearing shoes, yet in spite of that carrying a bundle over one shoulder, 
like one bound on a journey. 

" Going somewhere ? " I asked. 

" Al Cuzco," was the astonishing reply. A Peruvian boy actually 
leaving home to go somewhere else, just like a live American ! 

" Then we 'd better go together," I answered, as soon as I had re- 
covered my breath. 

The child rose without a word and turned his face with me toward 
the trail looping upward across the chasm. 

" What 's your name ? " I began lamely, as we strained along at the 
heels of Chusquito, who had seemed little less surprised than I at this 
extraordinary apparition. 

" Teofilo Fulano," replied our new companion. 

" Fulano ! Relative, perhaps, of the Sefior Fulano at whose hacienda 
I spent last night?" 

" Yes ; Don Faustino is my father." 

" Impossible ! " I cried. " He is only recently married and has no 
children." 

" Not since he is married," replied the child, innocently, " and he 
won't recognize me." 

" And your mother? " I continued after a time. 

" She keeps a chicha-shop in Andahuaylas," answered the boy. 
" She used to love Don Faustino." 

For hours we rose steadily, the valley of Pincos and the little river, 
frothing over the stones at its bottom, sinking lower and lower beneath 
us, a damp mountain-top coolness tempering our toil and somewhat 
offsetting the absence of drinkingwater. Our shadows crawled from 
under our feet and grew to erectness before us, and still the rather 
well-kept roadway looped upward. 

" Why do you go to Cuzco ? " I asked, breaking in upon the story 
of some boyish prank; for, once I had won his confidence, the child 
was garrulous, after the manner of his race. 

406 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

"One of my relatives lives there," he muttered. The answer was 
too exactly in the tone of the same reply in another tongue I had so 
often heard from the lips of " hoboing " youngsters in my own land 
to be taken for more than a subterfuge. I hold it any man's privilege 
to keep his own counsel, however, even though he has not yet reached 
the four- foot mark, and he was soon prattling on again as unbrokenly 
as if the steep slopes of his native mountains were level plain. 

A crude cross, surrounded by an irregular heap of stones tossed 
there one by one by passing Indians, marked the wind-blown summit. 
On the bit of pampa that preceded another stony descent stood the 
ruin of what may have been an Inca fortress or look-out, with another 
crazy cross atop. From it spread a vast view, with the morrow's road 
plainly in sight, squirming out of a half-concealed valley and panting 
away over another of the countless Andean ridges that divide this 
region as with a series of mighty walls. But it was long afterward 
that we came in sight of Huancarama, wedged in the throat of the 
gorge and extremely inviting, at a distance, to three famished and 
choking roadsters. 

Our reception there was so typical that I am minded to describe it, 
for all its similarity to other experiences. We had explored the 
place rather thoroughly before we located the dwelling of Ezequiel 
Palomino, the gobernador. It is a common ruse of the rural " author- 
ities " of Peru not only to hide from an arriving stranger, but to swear 
the rest of the town to secrecy. Small wonder, since they hold their 
positions on compulsion and without emoluments. Moreover, their 
inability to vizualize that which is absent gives these isolated rural 
officials a contempt for the government and its orders, unless it is 
actually there in person, and well armed. The doors of Don Eze- 
quiel's shop, facing the grazing-ground plaza, were closed, and his 
Indian women in the patio as stupid in their indifference, and as clumsy 
as usual at covering up their lies. The set answer to any inquiry for 
the head of such a household is a mumbled, " No 'sta 'ca," or its 
Quichua equivalent. Yet if one answer, " I did not ask where he was 
not, you wooden-headed daughter of a father without understanding; 
I asked, where is he ? " one is considered rude and unsimpatico. A 
long struggle brought only the information that the gobernador was in 
some indefinite place somewhere far-away or near at hand, and that he 
might or might not return in the natural course of events. 

But this time there was a loophole in the defenses of the besieged. 
A shop-keeper — keeping it, as well as all its accumulated stock, 

407 



. VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

seemed to be the extent of his activities — across the plaza turned out 
to be the alcalde, who evidently was privately disgruntled with his fel- 
low-official. For when my questions grew pressing, he swore me to 
secrecy and whispered: 

" The gobernador is at home asleep in his own house, because he is 
seasick to-day " ; and he winked ever so faintly at the generous display 
of bottles on the shelves beside us. 

Far be it from me to blame any man for whiling away an Andean 
existence in the only available fashion. But poor, uncomplaining 
Chusquito had already stood a long hour unfed and unwatered, his 
burden still upon him and twenty-five steep and stony miles in his 
slender legs. I lost no time in returning to the patio. The Indian 
women, seeing no way out of it, admitted that their lord and master 
was " sick in bed, but ya no mas ha de venir " — which may mean, " he 
is coming at once," or that he may come the day after to-morrow. I 
strode up the outside stairs to the second-story veranda and, throwing 
open the several doors, discovered at last the elusive official, a bleary- 
eyed half-breed of the most disgusting type. I slapped him in the 
face, figuratively at least, with my government order, and with a savage 
leer and an unhuman growl he ordered a servant to open for us a 
mud den facing the street. As to alfalfa, that, he mumbled, was 
" far away." I thrust a coin upon him, piled our junk in the bare 
dungeon with the little fatherless one to watch over it, and set out to 
forage food for ourselves. When I returned, the gobernador had car- 
ried out the legal requirements of his office by causing an Indian to 
toss before Chusquito a small handful of last year's corn-stalks. This 
time he had hidden himself effectually. I began a systematic search 
of the premises. In a back-yard, behind the patio wall, I found a 
half-dozen of the gobernador's fat horses stuffing themselves to burst- 
ing from an enormous heap of fresh, green alfalfa ! The Indian whom 
I caught by the slack of the garment and drove before me under all the 
load he could carry, pocketed a real with a promise to watch over the 
fodder, and to repeat the dose at dawn. But I also hovered for some 
time in the shadow near at hand, in the hope of catching some one at- 
tempting to snatch away Chusquito's hard-won meal, that I might 
fittingly express my feelings with the toe of a boot. No victim offered 
himself, however, and the little love-token and I rolled up together in 
my ponchos on the dirt floor, to spend a night during which the rain 
poured as it seldom does in the upper Andes. 

We were off at daylight, as travelers should be, along a fertile, V- 

408 



A view of Quito, capital of Ecuador, from the summit of the Panecillo 




View of Cu7.co, the ancient Inca capital, from the summit of Sacsahuaman 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

shaped valley. The rain had given the morning a scent of fresh lusti- 
ness rare in the dry Andes; birds sang gaily in the willows along the 
stream ; and great masses of snow-white clouds lay banked in the hol- 
lows of the mountains. Then came another mighty climb to a stag- 
nant, mountain-top lagoon, and the usual hundred yards or so of level 
going before we pitched down another of the stony bajadas that seem 
to shake all the bolts of the anatomy loose, like a runaway railway train 
bumping over the ties. Suddenly there disclosed itself to view one of 
those Andean vistas so tantalizing to the photographer, since any 
attempt to reproduce them on a film results only in a waste of effort 
and material. The earth had been scolloped out into an enormous 
valley, with a very green, thread-like river racing Amazonward far 
down in its rocky gorge ; hundreds of little stone-fenced patches newly 
plowed to await the rain, were scattered far and near on all the fertile, 
enclosing mountainsides that rose higher and higher as we descended. 
Each Indian chacra showed two tiny white houses connected by a high 
wall, which, no doubt, enclosed the corral, enticing — at least at a 
distance — in their specklessness. Then, far, far off across a vast ex- 
panse of gashed and tumbled valley, at the back of a great tilted 
field broken into squares of the yellow-green of sugar-cane, alternating 
with the deeper line of alfalfares, with a ribbon of road winding to, 
and swallowed up within it, could be plainly made out the little city of 
Abancay, backed by mountains capped with snow-white clouds. 

The brilliant sun had reduced things again to the old, familiar dry- 
as-dust condition, making a torture the long perpetual zigzag down to 
the river Pachachaca, flowing north through a deep cleft in the moun- 
tains to the hot Amazonian montafia and the Atlantic, the gleam of its 
blue waters tantalizing to our choking, desert thirst. I reached at 
last the stone and cement bridge of graceful arch straddling the gorge, 
only to find, to my dismay, that this passed high out of reach of 
the water. But we would not be choked thus in plain sight of the 
inviting stream. I turned Chusquito up along the bank and tramped 
a long distance through cactus and chaparral, dust and tropical heat, 
without finding a break in the jungle-clad, precipitous bank. At last, 
unable to endure the tantalizing sight longer, I took chance by the 
forelock and dragged the animal down through the clutching trees 
and undergrowth as far as he could possibly go, then unloaded him, 
standing on a huge rock as on a pedestal, and carried my junk the 
rest of the way to a shady spot beside the racing stream. There I 
cooked, ate, read, wrote, bathed, washed all my available clothing, and 

409 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

napped, and it was mid-afternoon before I had loaded again. The little 
son of the chicha-shop had fallen behind in the long descent. As I ate, 
he crossed the bridge above, but though I fired my revolver several 
times to attract his attention, he went on unheeding. All the four 
hours had been burdened with the worry of perhaps finding it impos- 
sible to get Chusquito back again up that jungled precipice and rock- 
spill ; but the little beast climbed it like a chamois in his native moun- 
tains, though a real horse would have refused to attempt it. 

Abancay is one of the most insignificant of department capitals, the 
lowest and most nearly tropical city of all this trans-Peruvian trip. 
Hot as it is, there are snowclads close behind and seeming hardly a 
rifle-shot away from the town, and back along the valley through 
which we had come the double Indian houses stood out as clear white 
specks far up the perpendicular mountain walls, fifteen and even 
twenty miles away. The place has probably fewer than 2000 in- 
habitants, of whom easily ninety percent, are more or less Indian, the 
few whites being chiefly importations in the form of government offi- 
cials. The town is not old, and is somewhat built to order. Yet it 
has not only electric lights, but a good water-supply — when this is not 
polluted on its journey as an open brook through the town. There is a 
simple monument, designed by my former host, Da Pozzo, to a local 
hero who rose to the lofty heights of a department prefectship; one of 
the few artistic things in Peru, because of its absence of over-orna- 
mentation. Bread was again worth nearly its weight in gold, the town 
being well below the wheat-line. A disease known as " obero " is 
common among the Indians, turning the face a sooty black. There 
is also a white " obero," which gives its victims the appearance of 
those negroes who seek to attain white skins by acid treatment. Some 
of the chola women are decidedly pretty, in spite of their habits ; but, 
as so often with their sex the world over, once they begin to suspect 
that fact they are prone to attempt to improve on nature, with dis- 
tressing results. Every woman wears the dicclla, a square of cloth 
richly embroidered and worked with flowers, about her shoulders. In 
it a baby is carried when the wearer attains one, apparently not a diffi- 
cult feat in Abancay. But none go without this article of attire, and 
he who does not look closely will scarcely notice whether the dicclla 
is full of baby, or is empty. 

In my first stroll about town I came upon the boy of Andahuaylas 
in one of the huts on the outskirts, where he was evidently avoiding 
me because he had eaten — raw — the five eggs I had given him to 

410 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

carry. He had fallen in with friends, and demonstrated his Latin- 
American temperament by giving up his plan to walk to Cuzco. 

The "Hotel Progreso " of Yacarias Trujillo is, like Abancay, more 
easily imagined than described. A stone-paved rectangle full of 
clothes-lines, flapping with garments of both sexes, of Indian and chola 
women and children of all degrees of ignorance of soap, of parrots, tur- 
keys, a belligerent goose, chickens without number, countless yellow 
curs, a dozen fat and self-assertive pigs, and an occasional drunken 
man, formed its center. A wall half-separated it from the barn- 
yard general-convenience and kitchen, beneath which flowed an open 
sewer and water-supply. My " room " was an ancient, lopsided, scar- 
faced, airless den opening directly off this, with the dust of ages on its 
battered and medieval furniture. The longer of the two maltreated 
wooden platforms on legs that posed as bedsteads was at least a foot 
shorter than I, though I make no great requirements in that respect, 
and I had either to hang my legs over the razor-edge of the footboard, 
or thrust one out at each corner. In these Andean hostelries the land- 
lord may hover around the guest on the day of his arrival, chiefly out 
of curiosity, commanding the servants who furnish the room to order. 
But he never does so on the succeeding days, as his attention is fully 
taken up with the little grocery, drunkery, and billiard-room on which 
his real income depends, and one is lucky indeed to lay hands once a 
day on a servant to bring a pitcher of water and empty the basura. As 
to a clean towel or a change of sheets, the only way to obtain them, 
whatever the length of stay, is to move to another hotel — in the un- 
likely event that one exists. But the accomplished bachelor prefers, on 
the whole, to be his own chambermaid, rather than admit to his room 
the average variety of Andean hotel servant. The service was genu- 
inely table d'hote, in that we gathered around the table with the entire 
family of our host, his children, dogs, and chickens, some local govern- 
ment officials, and the ubiquitous four-eyed German with his stale jokes 
and flat-footed attempts to make himself " simpatico." On Sunday 
we had to dinner a dried-up but still bright old lady who claimed to 
remember the battle of Ayacucho, 88 years before, and to have seen as 
a small girl the beaten Spaniards racing pell-mell through " Dead 
Man's Corner." 

Yacarias had learned none of those tricks of his tribe that are the 
burden of the traveler almost the world over. Though his rates 
were ninety cents a day, he refused to collect for the meal or two I 
ran over and when I left he forced upon me a roast chicken for my 

411 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

fiambre, or road lunch, as " a little remembrance." Moreover, to my 
astonishment he actually had Chusquito back from his pasture and tied 
in the patio with a juicy bundle of alfalfa before him, by the time the 
religious fiesta had sunk into its drunken sleep and quiet had settled 
down over the Andes. To have a Latin-American promise to do a 
thing and then to do it the same day was a breath-taking experience, 
indeed. 

We were off at the crack of dawn on the last stage of my march 
to the ancient capital of the Inca Empire. That eagerness the traveler 
always feels in nearing the scene of boyhood dreams caused me to scold 
Chusquito more than usual for not keeping out from underfoot on the 
famous climb to the next mountain notch, with its achapeta, or stone- 
heap, on which Indians are said to have tossed their coca-cuds since 
long before the Conquest. The descent was even swifter, and by three 
we had ended the nine leagues to Curahuasi, a scattered collection of 
huts on a high shelf of mountain. Chusquito had brought with him his 
own dinner wrapped in my rubber poncho, in the form of a wad of 
alfalfa he had not been able to finish in Abancay. But, though he man- 
aged to make away with it, he seemed to prefer the short, dry mountain- 
grass of the central plaza, consisting of a large, open space adorned by 
one lone eucalyptus. I was soon possessor of the Stone-age key and 
pad-lock of the cabildo, an empty mud cave furnished by the municipal- 
idad, to which the traveler is as legally entitled as to lodging in a French 
asile de nuit. The same building included the jail, full of the after- 
math of the religious fiesta in the persons of bleary-eyed Indians 
thrusting their faces through the wooden bars of the single window, 
imploring liquor and tobacco. But though I had wine, chicha, and 
pisco, and Peruvian prisoners are permitted anything they can lay 
hands on, it seemed wiser to let them reflect on the error of their ways. 
The ragged lieutenant-governor came to inquire if he should send a 
" cholita " to keep me company, and seemed to consider my negative re- 
ply a personal affront. Now and then an Indian, all but hidden under 
a load of green alfalfa, loped across the plaza, pursued by several asses 
taking a bite at every jump. It is the custom in this region for all 
aboriginals, men, women, or children, to snatch off their hats and mur- 
mur " Buenas tardes " — whatever the time of day — to every white 
man. If I failed to answer, they repeated that inane, redundant, and 
not always truthful remark in a loud, distressed voice until I re- 
plied, as if they feared some punishment unless their greeting was re- 
turned. When it came to every passerby thus insisting on recognition 

412 




Building a house in Peru. Mud and chopped straw are trampled together with the 

bare feet, loaded into a hod that is really a sun-dried ox-hide, and fashioned 

into such a wall as that in the background 




The patio of the "Hotel Progreso" of Abancay. The cook is peering through the hole in 

the wall by which she thrusts out to the servants at meal-time her 

nefarious concoctions 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

as often as he passed the cabildo doorway in which I sat writing my 
notes, it was hard to refrain from replying with the adobe brick 
nearest at hand. 

Birds were singing merrily in the molle trees when we descended a 
semi-desert bristling with cactus, then through precipitous stony que- 
bradas at the bottoms of which excited streams rushed headlong down 
from the mountain heights in their haste to join the unseen river 
below on its journey to the Atlantic. We were approaching the fa- 
mous Apurimac, the roar of whose waters already came up to us, and 
the crossing of which travelers have always looked forward to with 
misgiving. Yet it was only a very moderate river we came in sight 
of in mid-morning, exceedingly far down in the precipitous gorge it 
has cut for itself during the centuries. The leg-straining descent 
seemed endless; the road wound incessantly round the mountain, far 
up each profound ravine and back again, so that a two-mile walk was 
barely a 500-yard gain. Travelers now were numerous. Mule-trains 
with goods from the outside world by way of Cuzco appeared as dots 
on the sky-line crest of the range beyond, and crawled slowly down 
its barren face; Indians, bearing on their backs chickens, pigs, or the 
scanty produce of their chacras, climbed past us into the hot, cactus- 
grown world above. 

The blazing sun stood sheer overhead when we reached the river, or 
more exactly Tablachaca, the " board-bridge " high above it. Since 
long before the Conquest, simpichacas, the swaying Inca bridges of 
braided withes, have been thrown across this mighty gorge at various 
points, so that the passing of the Apurimac has long been synonymous 
with taking one's life in one's hands. But the tameness of modern 
times has intruded even here. To-day a solid bridge, built by a Phila- 
delphian and maintained, not by the government, but by the neigh- 
boring hacendados, carries the traveler across without a tremor. In 
an openwork, gnat-bitten hut beside it live the bridge-tender, a curi- 
ously old youth, and his mother, boasting themselves the grandson 
and daughter respectively of the builder, yet so purely Peruvian that 
they cannot even pronounce the name of their illustrious ancestor. 

Finding it possible to descend to the river by a series of natural 
stone steps, I determined to enjoy the distinction of a dip into the 
famous stream. The astonished bridge-tenders wished to know if I 
was a great swimmer, as their father and grandfather from Phila- 
delphia had been, and could I even out-gringo him by swimming clear 
across the river. I admitted that I could come near to making it, if 

413 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

there were a sheriff's posse at my heels and no bridge ; but neither of 
those contingencies staring me in the face, I saw no reason to risk 
coming home by way of the Amazon in the garb of Adam by attempt- 
ing a gratuitous " stunt " worthy of a genuine andarin. As I stood 
soaping my gnat-bitten frame, however, I fell to wondering why Pedro 
de la Gasca should have lost most of his horses and mules here on the 
way to his famous pussy-wants-a-corner game with Gonzalo Pizarro on 
the field of Xaquixaguana. For though it snarled and fretted against 
its rocky barriers with considerable force and speed, to any but a 
Spanish-speaking people the stream lapping at my knees would not 
exactly seem a great river. I came to the conclusion that his misfor- 
tune must have been due to the fact that Pedro was a priest, and to 
test the theory, swam across, sat a moment against the sheer rock 
wall that bounds the resounding gorge on the further side, and swam 
back again. True the stream moved with something more than Peru- 
vian energy, and not far below there was a fall with a threatening 
hollow roar where the man so foolish as to let himself be carried over 
might have sustained a few bumps and gashes. But there was nothing 
in the escapade to get excited over, much less to lose one's horses. 

Imagine my surprise, therefore, as I gripped my prehensile toes 
once more on the hither bank, to discover, just in time to save myself 
from shattering the proprieties to fragments, that all the surrounding 
countryside, large and small, male and female, Indian, half-breed and 
•)4-breed, was hanging over the precipice and bridge above, watch- 
ing with open mouths my marvelous and unprecedented feat. As 
I climbed the bank, reclad, the vigilante del puente and his mother 
fell upon me, insisting that such unrivalled prowess should not pass 
unrecorded, and getting possession of my note-book, they spent most 
of the afternoon in concocting a certificate of my epoch-making adven- 
ture, with all the signatures, rubricas, and seals thereunto appertaining. 

Beyond the river, now in the great department of Cuzco, we climbed 
a sheer mountain face, and descended with sunset to a mass of build- 
ings on a bluff, among immense stretches of yellow-green canefields. 
This was the hacienda " La Estrella " of Senator Montes, whom offi- 
cial duties held in Lima, but whose son, once he had overcome his 
racial prejudice against a man who came on foot and without a serv- 
ant, appointed an Indian valet to Chusquito and took upon himself 
my entertainment. His newly constructed mansion boasted all mod- 
ern improvements, from electric lights to paintings on the walls of 
corredor and rooms " by a famous imported artist." In the well- 

414 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

appointed sugar-mill the cane of the surrounding fields was turned 
into white, cone-shaped sugar-loaves and concentrated merriment, the 
latter selling at $9 a hundred liters, of which something more than 
half went to the government. Two salt-inspectors joined us at the for- 
mal dinner in the overdecorated mansion. Salt being a government 
monopoly, Peru swarms with salt-inspectors, salt-police, salt-detec- 
tives, official salt-weighers, and so on to national bankruptcy. The 
reddish rocks mined on the Montes estate were bought by the govern- 
ment at ten cents a hundred-weight — and sold in official estancos at 
$2.50! 

As we sat, — Montes the younger, his half-dozen white overseers, 
and the salt-inspectors — before the door of the cabin that had been 
assigned me, the tropical full moon casting over the scene a brightness 
almost equal to that of a sunny day, a hundred picturesquely clad 
Indian peons, carrying medieval hoes and axes, lined up before us for 
roll-call, then scattered to their huts. The hacienda's vast army of 
laborers refuse for the most part to live in the tenement-like houses, in 
long, identical rows, of which my own lodging was one, but insisted, 
with the conservatism so deeply engrained in their race, on building 
their own huts, of far poorer accommodations. Each peon was given 
a piece of land on which to erect his dwelling and plant his garden, 
free pasturage for a few animals, and a wage of 20 cents a day, when 
he worked for the hacienda. This he did only every other month, and 
thanks to church festivals and the concentrated cane juice with which 
they are enlivened, by no means all the days of that. The women 
had no obligations to the hacienda, but lived on it merely as appen- 
dices to their husbands — old maids, of course, are unknown among 
South American Indians — doing only such work about the estate- 
house as they could be coaxed to do, or " what they were ordered by 
their husbands." Under the silver-flooding moon the gathering of 
gente grew reminiscent, and on every hand floated stories of Peru, 
ending with one by the son which explained why Montes the elder had 
become wealthy and a Senator and had had such extraordinary all- 
around luck — because he had picked up at the Chicago Exposition 
twenty years before a horseshoe, which was still carefully guarded. 

The moon had set, though the forerunner of day had not yet ap- 
peared, when, after trying in vain to punch awake the peon Montes 
had ordered to attend me, I entered the immense hacienda corral to 
pescar, or " fish out," as the Peruvians say, my horselet from the army 
of mules and horses munching the dry pulp of crushed sugarcane that 

415 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

constitutes the fodder of these near-tropical regions. I had no diffi- 
culty in recognizing my own animal in the dark, not only by his dimin- 
utiveness, but by his picturesquely docked tail. Looking back on that 
day, however, I am sorry I did not pescar another animal by mis- 
take. 

As I prepared to load him before my cabin door, I was startled to 
find that Chusquito seemed to have turned zebra during the night. 
Several dark lines ran from his spine down either side to his shaggy 
belly. The sense of smell astonished me with the information that 
these were of blood. I got water and washed him off, meanwhile 
cursing the savage mules that had evidently spent most of the night 
biting the helpless little brute. As a former Zone Policeman, trained 
to arrest every Panamanian coachman who dared enter the Canal 
Zone with a horse matado, I had taken extreme care to keep my own 
animal free from those back-sores so atrociously frequent and un- 
attended in the Andes. But the soft alforjas could not add to his 
injuries. I, too, had been bitten, until my frame was one single ex- 
panse of tattooing ; and Chusquito must bear his share of troubles 
unavoidable in the tropics. I arranged the load as carefully as pos- 
sible, and we were off. 

It was not long, however, before I realized that something, perhaps 
the impossibility of eating during the night, had decidedly sapped my 
companion's strength. He did not tramp with his old-time vim; the 
joy of life seemed to have departed from him. I moderated my pace, 
thinking my haste to reach the climax of my South American journey 
was unconsciously causing me to outdo the pace we had long since 
agreed upon. Still he would not keep out from under my feet. For 
almost the first time 1 in our acquaintance I found it necessary to touch 
him up with a stick. We were moving along a semi-tropical hollow, 
amid the deafening scream of parrakeets, with an occasional sharp dip 
into and climb out of a stony quebrada, from which I had almost to 
carry him by main force. He moved like a clock that was running 
down, and for the life of me I could not contrive the means of winding 
him up again. Then, all at once, I realized what had befallen him. 
The poor, misused brute had been bitten, not by mules, but by those 
loathsome vampire bats of tropical valleys that sometimes find even 
human victims for their blood-sucking propensities. 

We crawled at last into the mud village of Limatambo, only to be 
informed that there was no alfalfa in town, and that we must push on 
at least to the " Hacienda Challabamba," half a league up the valley. 

416 




A religious procession in Abancay. Note the group of urchins in the church- 
tower vying with each other in beating the bells into an uproar 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

As we turned toward it, I was startled to find the way bordered by 
a splendid wall of cut stone, about which the effete modern inhabitants 
had pitched their miserable mud huts. For here, commanding the 
narrow entrance to the valley, stood one of those four fortresses 
with which the ancient emperors of Tavantinsuyo had defended, at 
some twelve leagues from the capital, the highways radiating to the 
Four Corners of the Earth. Chusquito had lost all response to any 
species of outside influence. Push as I would, putting my shoulder 
to the wheel — I would say rump — and digging my toes into the trail, 
we could not advance a mile an hour. The drooping animal took a 
half minute to lift each separate foot, a pebble caused him to 
stumble, a six-inch rock step made him groan audibly. He did not 
look particularly worn-out ; he was fatter if anything than the day I had 
bought him; and surely even a man could have gone the mile or two 
more " on his nerve." Instead, he came to a complete standstill. 
This would never do. At least we must reach the hacienda and its 
alfalfa-fields. Much as it grieved me to raise a hand against a faith- 
ful companion, I rapped him soundly across the quarters with my 
stick. He uttered a sudden pathetic groan, and dropped in the middle 
of the road as suddenly as a well-killed bull in a Spanish bull-ring ; his 
legs quivered a moment, his eyes opened wide, closed, then opened 
again in a glassy stare. 

Despite all my blustering before soulless gobernadores who would 
have starved him in the midst of plenty, despite all my struggles to find 
him food when even I had gone without, the patient little brute had 
come to this sad end. Never had I felt the loss of a traveling com- 
panion more keenly. For six weeks we had toiled together over lofty 
Andean ranges, across vast paramos with nothing in sight but their 
dreary nothingness. How often had we not listened to each other con- 
tentedly dining in our adjacent chambers at the end of a laborious 
day? If we had had differences, they had been only those which 
arise between all beings with wills of their own, joined together on a 
long journey. And the end of that journey had been so near at hand. 
I had long looked forward to our triumphal entry into Cuzco to- 
gether, to having our pictures proudly taken side by side in the main 
plaza, and to the pleasure of presenting him as a pet to the children of 
the one American I knew dwelt in the ancient capital — should it turn 
out that the latter had any such appendages — that he might toil no 
more and end his days in the beloved mountain air of his native 
heights. Instead of which, here I sat on the edge of a Peruvian trail, 

417 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

gazing at a shattered dream stiffening in the blazing sunshine before 
me. 

But the experienced traveler will not let misfortune long interfere 
with the regular flow of his existence. Behind the bristling cactus 
hedges lining the road were several Indian hovels. I risked leaving 
alone what was left of my possessions to walk to the nearest, some 
fifty yards away. Two arrieros, a boy, and a woman, were lounging 
within it. The muleteers spoke a Quichua somewhat different from 
that I had picked up ; moreover they were half drunk. I offered them 
a good reward to toss my stuff on one of their grazing mules and carry 
it to " Challabamba." But they were bound for " La Estrella " — 
probably five or six hours later — and could not turn back. Perhaps 
it brings bad luck. The woman would not be compromised, even to 
the extent of admitting my existence. As a final straw the boy re- 
fused a " peseta " to carry a note to the hacienda. 

I returned to the scene of the disaster and sat down hopelessly in 
the shrinking shadow of the hedge. The connecting link between a 
sahib and his baggage kept running like a refrain through my head. 
Indian travelers and mule-trains passed to and fro, staring curiously 
and seeming, in so far as the impassive Indian face shows anything, 
to smirk with satisfaction at my plight. At least I could pull my 
belongings off the corpse ; though not easily, with the " diamond- 
hitch " and the ropes wound round and round the body. Luckily the 
animal had fallen on the side carrying my " city " clothing, and had 
spared the developing-tank. I disentangled my still existent pos- 
sessions and piled them beside me in the shade. An hour crawled by ; 
another was crawling. Something must be done. I could neither 
leave my baggage unprotected here beside one of the four royal high- 
ways leading into, or out of the City of the Sun — depending on which 
way one was going, were one going at all — nor could I carry it my- 
self, such was the bulk to which it had accumulated. I drew out a 
visiting-card, that proof of the caballero caste in South America, and 
wrote upon it: 

" Vengo recomendado por los senores de La Laguna, pero a 'tres cuadras 
de su hacienda me ha muerto de repente el caballo. Puede V. mandarme tin 
indio para que me ayude con el equipaje?" 

The owners of " Challabamba " were relatives of my host of the 
first night out of Andahuaylas, and he had implored me to stop with 

418 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

them. As to the horse, it was best not to try to explain offhand that 
it was not one I had been riding. Awaiting my chance, I picked out 
an old Indian woman stubbing along the stony, rising trail, twirling her 
ubiquitous yarning-spindle, and explained to her in my most fluent and 
Incaic, not to say archaic, Quichua, that she was to give the note to 
Don Francisco when she passed his hacienda. 

But like most of her race sent on errands, she probably forgot it, 
or concluded I did n't mean what I had said, or thought of some other 
incomprehensible reason for not delivering it, such as not having the 
consent of her yaya, or father confessor, or she decided to keep 
it as fuel, or Don Francisco was " No 'sta 'ca " as usual, or he did n't 
care to have travelers recomendado by his relatives, or que se yo. The 
empty, blazing minutes expanded into half hours; these in turn into 
hours, and still life drifted eventlessly on. I dug out a battered copy 
of Marcus Aurelius, and strove to pass the time as pleasantly as possi- 
ble until fate saw fit to make a suggestion. Limping old Epictetus 
would have been far more to the point under the circumstances. The 
sun drew relentlessly away on its westward journey, the handful of 
shade crawled on all fours under the cactus hedge and spread into 
the uninviting field beyond. I transferred my sundry, not to say 
sun-dried, chattels to the other side of the road and continued my 
reading. An old, near-white fellow hobbled past and desired to know 
what I was doing there. I replied that the densest of human beings 
could see that I was installing an electric light-and-power plant, and 
could he, as quite evidently the oldest resident of these parts and a 
man of extraordinary intelligence, suggest any means of starting the 
dynamo. His brilliant, but not wholly unexpected reply was, " Where 
do you come from where are you going? " If one dragged a Peruvian 
out of bed at midnight to say that his wife had just hanged herself in 
the patio and should be cut down as soon as convenient, he would cer- 
tainly cry, " Y a 'onde vueno ? " I finally stirred up his drivelling 
intellect to the point where he announced himself the owner of a small 
hacienda not far away, and he promised that as soon as he returned 
from a social call up the road he would see whether he had an animal 
that could carry my stuff to his house, and an Indian that cared to fetch 
it. I picked up my book once more — and just then Chusquito raised 
his head and gazed listlessly about him, like one of the opposite sex 
coming out of a faint, or one of our own regaining the first con- 
sciousness of the cold gray dawn of a morning after. Then getting 

419 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

unsteadily to his feet, that deceitful, ungrateful, possum-playing rascal 
stood up, staggered through the cactus hedge, and fell to nibbling the 
stubble of the field beyond! 

The octogenarian had not mentioned the date of his proposed re- 
turn and, whatever it was, it had not arrived when there appeared 
along the road I would have traveled a near-Indian in some cast-off 
clothing and the same kind of Spanish, leading a stout, " empty " 
mule. Don Francisco, as I had suspected, was not at home, and la 
seiiora had evidently slept the siesta on the note before acting upon 
it. Chusquito, though on his feet again, was of course too weak to be 
reloaded, and even in the clothes he stood in I could only drag him 
along a few feet to the minute by pulling like a Dutchman — or more 
exactly, a Dutch woman — on a canal tow-path, the inscrutable near- 
Indian, with the mule bearing my baggage, bringing up the funereal 
rear. A score of times I was on the point of abandoning the derelict 
far from port and alfalfa, but contained myself in patience, recalling 
the former virtues of the deceiving creature, and sweated at last with 
him into the hacienda corral. The estate was just then in supreme 
command of a woman of such cold indifference to my sad tale that she 
might as well have spoken only Quichua, instead of being so versed 
in Spanish that she was performing the extraordinary feat, for a 
South American country-woman, of reading a novel of Dumas in that 
tongue. The " parlor " of the low adobe building was papered with 
the pages of illustrated weeklies from many lands and in many lan- 
guages, and there the illustrious and the notorious of all countries 
rubbed shoulders, — the latest champion of the fistic world beside the 
ivory-like dome of an experienced American presidential candidate, 
the Pope in the act of blessing a group of Mexican bandits, the Ameri- 
can rector of the University of Cuzco arm in arm, as it were, with a 
famous Spanish bull-fighter. 

In a corner of the corral Chusquito had fallen upon a heap of 
alfalfa in a way to show that, whatever his appearance, he was far 
from dead. But the hacienda people assured me the animal could not 
possibly carry my stuff to Cuzco; that, like a nervous breakdown, his 
ailment called for long rest and weeks of good feeding. I might perder 
cuidado, however, as they would lend me a chusco and an Indian for 
the rest of the journey. From their careful avoidance of any sug- 
gestions on the subject, it was evident that they fancied I would leave 
Chusquito where he was, and that they would automatically fall heir 
to him. I may look like that in my pictures, but photography is at 

420 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

best deceiving. Moreover, I had not forgotten that it is a common 
human failing to take far less care of that which is given than of that 
which is bought. A wily old compadre of the family, smelling how 
the wind blew, said he would buy the animal himself were it not that 
he had only that week finished and a won a 27-year lawsuit against 
some Franciscan friars for the possession of an hacienda, and was 
penniless in consequence. The brother of the absent Don Francisco, 
who chanced to ride over from his neighboring hacienda, assured me 
the eighteen soles I had paid in Huancayo was an " atrocious " price, 
and after the rest of the usual prelude to a bargain in Peru, offered me 
eight. I forgot myself and accepted too quickly ; whereupon he walked 
slowly around the animal until, finding a discolored fetlock or some 
other fatal blemish, he lightly broke his word and offered six. After 
a sharp and scintillating exchange of gypsying, I pocketed seven, and 
sadly watched the constant companion of my most pleasant six weeks 
on the road in Peru led slowly away to a large green spot up the valley, 
the order of his new master, to give him all the alfalfa he could eat, 
ringing in his ears. Yet I knew only too well his preference for the 
tough paramo grasses of his native upper heights. 

La sefiora had promised that I should start by six, whence it was un- 
usually good luck that I actually dashed out through the hacienda 
gate at seven, my possessions behind me on a little gray chusco in 
charge of one of the wooden-headed Indians of the region, sent to 
lead the animal to Cuzco and back. The first half of his task did not 
last long. After I had paused to wait for him a dozen times or more 
in the first furlong, I came back to kick him off the end of the tow- 
rope and take personal charge of the expedition. Gradually the great, 
semi-tropical valley where Chusquito had found the end of his jour- 
neyings shrunk to a hollow in the earth, then to a mere hole, wavy 
blue with distance, that finally disappeared forever from my eyes. 
The brown pampa and exhilarating air of upper heights appeared 
once more, with magnificent views of the Andes on every hand as far 
as the eye could range. The wooden Indian disappeared for hours, 
and I fancied I was rid of him for the rest of the journey. But he 
caught up, and dropped at the roadside with an almost audible sigh of 
relief, the coca quid still in his cheek, the bag of eggs I had entrusted 
to him still intact, where I paused for dinner on the edge of a floor- 
flat plain that had evidently once been a lake-bottom. The mood 
came upon me to treat him as an equal, to see what the effect might 
be. I shared with him such a meal as he had certainly never before 

421 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

enjoyed; but his outward expression showed neither gratitude nor any 
other emotion, though he mumbled the customary " Gracias, tayta- 
tayta " in the tone one would expect from a wooden Indian. A more 
passive human being it would be hard to imagine. He ate boiled 
oatmeal without a murmur, though it was plain he neither recognized 
nor liked it. When I pointed to the approaching storm and mur- 
mured, " Para — it rains," he muttered, " Para, sefior." " Munan- 
quichu cocata?" I asked. " Ari, sefior," he mumbled, and waited 
like a stone image until I had handed him a pinch of coca leaves. 
" Munanquichu copita?" "Ari, seiior," and he drank the pisco as 
impassively as he had eaten the oatmeal. Had I announced that it 
was snowing, or asked him to take poison, I should have expected the 
same passive acquiescence. 

The plain broadened to the immense Pampa de Anta, the " plain of 
Xaquixaguana " of Prescott, stretching to far-off mountain-walls on 
either hand. Along the base of these, to the left, hung some splendid 
examples of ancient Inca andenes, or terraced fields. Thousands of 
cattle speckled the plain in every direction, dim villages stood forth 
on projecting headlands, while several snow-clads peered over the bor- 
dering range to the north. The ground was half-marshy, but a broad, 
partly paved, raised highway stretched straight ahead as far as the eye 
could see. It began to rain. It always does on the Pampa de Anta, 
if local information is trustworthy. It was such a rain as one rarely 
encounters in the high Andes, mixed with hail and punctuated by 
roaring crashes of thunder. Lightning is so frequent on the Pampa 
de Anta that natives always fee their favorite saint before crossing 
it, and the government, a bit more materialistic in its superstitions, 
has provided each pole of the two-wide telegraph line with lightning- 
rods. A well-meaning Peruvian had advised me, if, as was certain, 
I should be overtaken by a thunder-storm on the pampa, to take refuge 
at once under a telegraph-pole and remain there until the storm was 
over. 

Instead I splashed on, wet to the thighs, singing between the crashes 
of thunder, so great was my joy at approaching Cuzco. As the storm 
slackened, the world about me became musical with the chorus of 
frogs. All day the costume of Indians had been gradually changing. 
The pancake hat of Cuzco was now in the majority ; the knee breeches 
and skirts were shorter ; the faces were distinctly darker — or was it 
dirtier ? — and even more stupid than the type with which I had grown 
so familiar. Greetings were more obsequious than ever. Even the 

422 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

women raised their hats to me as they duck-trotted by, and more 
than one carried my thoughts back to Inca days by a respectful 
" Buenas tardes, Viracocha." 

It became evident we could not reach Cuzco by daylight. We 
halted at Izcochaca, the Indian curling up in a far corner of the mud 
corredor assigned us, with only his thin semi-tropical garb upon him, 
too passive to find himself the ragged old poncho I discovered in a 
corner and threw over him. It rained most of the night, making 
much of the twelve miles left a quagmire broken by patches of 
atrocious cobbling. No conquistador of old looked forward more 
eagerly than I to the first glimpse of the Navel of the Inca Empire; 
yet as always at the end of a long journey the last miles seemed trebly 
drawn out. The road that had been perfectly level since the preceding 
noonday began to clamber over bumps and rises, from the tops of 
each of which I strained my eyes in vain for the long-anticipated 
sight. Towns grew up along the way, birds sang in clumps of euca- 
lypti, the peon slapped sluggishly along behind me, apparently seeing 
no further than his coca-cud; broad vistas of a tumbled and shadow- 
patched mountain world, with an occasional flash of the long snow 
and glacier-clad cordillera, spread and contracted as I hurried onward. 
The road passed through deep-rutted hollows and under the graceful 
old arch of an aqueduct ranging away with giant strides across the 
rolling uplands; but still no city. Again and again I topped a ridge, 
only to be newly disappointed, until I came almost to fancy this was 
only some dream city of the imagination toward which we were headed. 

Then all at once, without warning, the road dived downward, 
turned a sharp angle, and there, below and before me, in mid-morning 
of October 17, lay spread out in all its extent the City of the Sun. 
Like the passing Indians, I, too, paused on the edge of the rocky shelf, 
and was almost moved to follow their lead in snatching off my hat 
and murmuring reverently, " O Ccoscco, Hatun Llacta, Napai cuiqui 
— Oh, Cuzco, Great City, I salute thee ! " For to the aboriginals 
Cuzco is still a sanctified spot, venerated not only as the abode of the 
Incas, but of all those deities that still, in spite of its outward Chris- 
tianity, preside over the ancient Empire of Tavantinsuyo. My peon 
showed not a hint of surprise when I knelt to make a tripod of 
stones for my kodak, no doubt fancying it some instrument of wor- 
ship it was quite natural any human being should set up at first sight 
of what to all mankind must be the noblest scene in all the world. 

In a way his veneration was justified. Some have it that Cuzco 

423 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

is superior in situation to even Bogota and Quito. In physical beauty 
alone this is not quite true. But what with that, combined with its his- 
torical memories, there are few such fascinating moments in the 
traveler's experience as this first glimpse of the ancient Inca capital. 
I, for one at least, looked down upon it with a thrill exceeding even 
that awakened by Rome or Jerusalem. 

The city covered the northern and more elevated end of a half- 
green plain, enclosed by velvety-brown mountain flanks and dying 
away in hazy, labyrinthian distance. On the edge of the ridge on 
which we stood, Sacsahuaman, a mere knoll from this height, with 
its fortress, frowned down upon the city. A bulking, two-tower 
cathedral faced an immense plaza, faded red roofs giving the scene 
its chief color, until this broke into the velvet green of the plain, 
which in turn shaded into the soft brown of the surrounding 
ranges. But neither words nor photographs can give more than a 
faint hint of the charm and fascination of what is in many respects 
the most interesting spot in the Western Hemisphere, a charm 
enhanced by the anticipation of a long overland journey. There 
came upon me pity for the tourist who comes sneaking into the 
famous city by train along the valley below. This in its turn was 
succeeded by a regret that the hands of time could not be set back 
400 years, to the day when Balboa first peered out upon the Pacific, 
that I might sit here and watch the activities of a world totally dif- 
ferent from that we know ; a regret that what men call the Conquest 
of Peru ever happened. What days were those, when there were 
really new worlds to discover ! What would I not have given to 
have preceded Pizarro a bit — and been provided with the magic cap 
of invisibility to save me from being served up as an exotic delicacy 
on the Inca's table. 

A swift, stony descent that soon became a regular cobbled stair- 
way, once topped by the Huancapuncu, or West Gate, led through 
none too pleasantly scented suburbs, the population staring agape at 
sight of a white man in shirt-sleeves and belligerently armed de- 
scending afoot into the famous city. The chusco and Indian fol- 
lowed at my heels across a great market square, past a prettily flowered 
little rectangle, and I marched at last out upon the broad central 
plaza, so densely populated with the shades of history. I had loafed 
away thirty-eight days since leaving Huancayo, though only twenty- 
two of them had been even partly spent on the road. The distance had 
proved almost exactly 400 miles, making a total of 2380 miles that I 

424 



THE GITY OF THE SUN 

had covered on foot since Hays and I walked out of the central plaza 
of Bogota nearly fourteen months before. 

The City of the Sun, ancient capital of the Inca Empire, which 
Garsilaso called Cozco and Stevenson Couzcou, is to-day but a shadow 
of its once imperial grandeur. The famous Inca historian states that 
the name corresponded to the Spanish ombligo, and from his day to 
this writers have referred to it as the Navel of the Inca Empire. 
Educated cuzquefios of to-day deny this derivation, asserting that the 
Quichua word for navel is, and always has been, pupu. The talkative 
old successor of Valverde chanced, when I called upon him, to have 
just been reading an ancient manuscript in which the words ccori 
ccoscco (crumbs or shavings of gold), occurred frequently in the de- 
scription of the city, and he held this to be the real origin of the 
name. 

Whatever of truth or exaggeration there may have been in the 
statements of old chroniclers that the city gleamed with gold at the 
time of the Conquest, little of that royal aspect remains. The chief 
and almost only material reminders of the days of the Incas are long 
walls of beautiful cut stone in the central portion of the modern 
city. Indeed, in all Peru the mementoes of the ancient race are almost 
wholly confined to walls. Some of these are " dressed down " so 
smoothly that the joints seem mere pencil-marks. Most of them are 
cyclopean, rough-hewn boulders of irregular size and shape, similar 
to the Pitti Palace in Florence, which is by no means so perfect 
in workmanship. There are almost no curved or circular walls, the 
chief exception to this being the former Temple of the Sun, now the 
Dominican monastery, where, like mud huts superimposed on the ruins 
of a mighty race, contented old friars lounge among the glories of 
long ago. The remnants are chiefly street after street in which the 
old walls have been left standing from six to twenty feet high, the 
whitewashed adobe of the ambitionless modern descendants above 
them. For the most part these form only one side of each street, 
for the elbow-rubbing passageways of the Incas, of which one still 
remains intact, were too narrow even for Spanish notions. But the 
city of to-day is still defined by these long reaches of elaborately cut 
stones, which, legend has it, divided the ancient capital into regular 
squares. They are Egyptian in aspect, these massive walls, shrinking 
toward the top, as do the rare doors and openings of Inca construc- 
tion that have survived. Here and there they have been rudely torn 
open to give entrance to a blacksmith-shop, a bakery, a chicharia, or, 

425 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

it would seem, for no other reason than the mere lust for destruction. 
Everywhere old walls stare out upon the passerby with Indian stolid- 
ity, as if refusing to tell the stories they might so easily if they chose. 
Even where the walls themselves have disappeared to furnish build- 
ing material for the churches and monasteries of the conquerors, the 
magnificent doorways have sometimes been preserved as the entrance 
to some modern hovel, and give a suggestion of what this imperial city, 
so ruthlessly destroyed, might have been. 

It is only these walls and the historical memories with which they 
are saturated that distinguish Cuzco from any other city of the 
Sierra. The life of the place is drab and uninspiring, wellnigh as 
colorless as the most monotonous village of the Andes. The me- 
tropolis, no doubt, of the Western Hemisphere in the fifteenth cen- 
tury, in the twentieth it seems a little backwater almost wholly cut 
off from the main stream of life. For a long time after the Conquest 
it was queen of the Andes, greater even than Lima. Then as the 
Inca highway fell into decay under the squabbling and incompetent 
successors of the provident Incas, it shrunk away into its mountain- 
girdled isolation, until to-day it is less known to Peru itself than 
is London or Berlin. For one limeno who has visited Cuzco, the his- 
torical gem of the continent, a hundred have journeyed to Paris. 

The Conquistadores, fond of exaggerating their prowess by mul- 
tiplying the numbers of their defeated enemies, ascribed to Cuzco 
200,000 inhabitants. This is inconceivable. To-day a trustworthy 
census, taken by the American rector of the university a few weeks 
before my arrival, shows the population to be slightly under 20,000. 
It may, this authority fancies, have numbered 100,000 at the time of 
the Conquest. The percentage of marriages was found to be ex- 
tremely low, though the birth-rate holds its own. A few white officials 
and comer ciantes, what would be called petty shopkeepers elsewhere, 
are in evidence; otherwise Cuzco has chiefly the aspect of an Indian 
town, its plazas too vast for its shrunken population. 

An ancient chronicler tells us that " through the heart of the capital 
ran a river of pure water, its sides faced with stone for a distance of 
twenty leagues." Granting that he carelessly wrote leagues when he 
would have said cuadras, none but a Spaniard would call the stream 
a river, and the purity of its water, if it ever existed, has long since 
departed. To-day this " stone-faced " Huatenay at the bottom of its 
deep-gashed gorge becomes a trickling sewer as it enters the town, 
passing directly beneath the principal buildings and carrying off such 

426 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

refuse as its sluggishness makes possible. The vast central plaza, 
far from level and once even larger than to-day, is faced as usual 
by the cathedral, second only to that of Lima, or, being of stone 
rather than of reeds and plaster, perhaps to be rated the first in Peru. 
There is something of the soft velvet-brown of Salamanca about the 
churches of Cuzco, that calls, not for a kodak, but for an artist. The 
blue-black plaster interior, pretending to be also of cut stone, is divided, 
after the Spanish custom, by the choir, with splendid carved stalls. 
In the sacristy are ranged the dusky portraits of all the Bishops of 
Cuzco, from sophistical old Valverde to him of the gold-leaf theory. 
In the scented twilight of the nave gather all the motley population, 
the male gente only excepted, after the free-for-all manner of 
Andean churches. Dogs are not permitted to enter. But it is a 
strange Latin-American rule that cannot be circumvented. I have 
seen a chola pause at the door, sling her puppy in the manto on her 
back, as she would have carried a baby, and enter to kneel before a 
tinselled image, the puppy licking her face affectionately from time to 
time as she prayed. 

In the center of the plaza stands a fountain topped by a life-size 
bronze Indian. A figure of some great Inca? No, indeed; but a 
North American " redskin," feathers, in buckskins, unAndean haughti- 
ness and all, armed with such a bow and arrows as no Inca ever 
beheld. The exotic is ever more pleasing than the local. The ornate 
fagade of " La Compania," testimonial to Jesuit wealth in colonial 
days, stares awry at the cathedral. Around the other sides of the 
square are the usual arched and pillared arcades, gaudy with every- 
thing that appeals to the eye and purse of the Peruvian muleteer. 
Here are gay leather knapsacks in which to carry his coca and less 
valuable possessions, richly decorated trappings for his animals, 
quenas, or fifes, to while away the weary hours across the unpeopled 
paramos, and the many-colored " skating-caps " with earlaps which are 
worn not only by babies, but by many of the Indians of surrounding 
hamlets. The clashing of shod hoofs sounds now and then over the 
cobbles, but the absence of vehicles, which is so curious a feature 
of the interior cities of the Andes, would be striking to a newcomer. 
A " ferrocarril de sangre," what we might call a street-car of flesh 
and blood — a roofed platform on wheels behind phlegmatic mules — 
rambles down to the station on train-days. Memories of viceregal 
times hover about the rare sedan-chair that serves the same purpose. 
Cuzco had no electric lights . as yet, though she continued to hope, 

427 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

and my friend Martinelli had enstalled a dynamo to operate his cinema 
in the patio of the " Hotel Central." 

Cuzco was the first place in South America with any hint of a 
tourist resort about it. Visitors have become almost familiar sights, 
and there was already developing that pest of European show-places, 
unwashed and officious urchins offering their services as " guides," 
an occupation undreamed of elsewhere on the continent. A wily 
Catalan resident pays any street Arab twenty cents for bringing him 
first news of the arrival of a foreigner — by train ; those who tramp 
in from the north are, of course, overlooked — taking a sporting chance 
on recovering the dos reales from the possible victim. But the busi- 
ness is still in embryo, though there are those who prophesy that 
Cuzco will some day become the Rome of South America — not en- 
tirely to its own advantage. 

There are many points of similarity between Cuzco and Quito, 
located at opposite ends of what is left of the ancient Inca highway. 
In climate they are much alike. Being 11,380 feet above the sea and 
on the thirteenth parallel south, surrounded by high and snowy moun- 
tains, even though at some distance, one would expect the former capi- 
tal of Tavantinsuyo to be colder. But even in this rainy season, though 
the atmosphere was often lead-heavy from the almost constant down- 
pour, it was only more dreary, not lower in temperature. Neither 
of the two cities has a river worthy the name; the Machangara and 
the Huatenay, with their slight branches, serve alike as dumping- 
grounds, and equally break the soil with deep quebradas. Splendid 
views of both cities may be had from the mountains that shut them in, 
though in this respect Quito surpasses. The soft evening air, the sing- 
ing of birds, the rows of tall, maidenly-slender eucalyptus trees behind 
massive mud walls, the long roads to the railway stations, are alike 
characteristic of the two towns. In both an atrocious din of church- 
bells tortures the hours before dawn, though here again the Ecuadorian 
capital wins the palm ; nor can the cuzquefio policeman rival his fellow 
of the equator in shrilling away the monotonous hours of darkness. 
To nearly as great an extent as in Quito the patios and lower stories 
are given over to Indians and servants, with the " gente decente " 
holding the upper floor. Both towns are colorful in garb; both are 
peerless when the sun shines, and gloomy under clouds ; both have the 
drowsy air of places far removed from the real world, with many times 
the number of shops needed droning through a precarious existence. 
On the other hand, whereas the Indians of Quito speak Spanish also, 

428 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

here one must know Quichua to carry on any extended intercourse. 
There are a few beautiful women in Quito, too; I never saw one in 
Cuzco, though this may be merely another instance of my abominable 
luck. Some Indian girls between five and fifteen are pretty, but they 
are so often veiled by the grime of years that the virtue must be 
chiefly accepted on faith. Nor has Cuzco anything approaching that 
unrivalled circle of hoar-headed peaks that ennobles the vista of its 
rival to the north. The two cities would probably be about equal 
in population were Cuzco also the national capital — as it should and 
hopes some day to be. " We want to free ourselves from those de- 
generate negroes of Lima and establish an independent government 
under an American protectorate," a self-styled lineal descendant of 
the Incas by way of Tupac Amaru confided to me. As it is, Quito 
is more than three times the larger. 

Cuzco has been called the dirtiest city on earth. I am not sure it 
merits the title. The Andean town that aspires to that proud and 
haughty position will have to exert itself constantly — no cuzquefio 
characteristic — keeping always on the alert for new and hitherto un- 
invented styles of uncleanliness ; for it will have dogged, unrelenting 
competition, vastly more determined and energetic than any other form 
of industry. Quito, for instance, is a formidable rival in this also, 
especially as Cuzco has the handicap of a much smaller population — 
and in a contest of this kind every little one helps. But though it is 
too early to prophesy the final rating, there is little doubt that the 
former Inca capital will at least win honorable mention — unless she 
continues to import American alcaldes. 

Which brings me to the chief influence in modern Cuzco. Among 
the legends of the origin of the Inca Empire is the tradition of a tall, 
imperious man of white skin, with blond hair on both head and cheeks, 
who arose from the sea and took up the task of teaching the Children 
of the Sun more proper ways of living. He was called Ingasman, 
whence some have held that he was a castaway Briton from some 
ship blown to these distant shores long before the days of Columbus. 
A fantastic yarn ; yet is it impossible ? The imagination likes to dwell 
on the possibility of the improbable story. Such an origin might 
account for the stolid British temperament of the Indians of the 
Andes ; as to complexion, leave an Englishman in the tropics for gen- 
erations and the result would be no darker than the self-styled lineal 
descendant of Tupac Amaru above mentioned. Whatever the truth 
of the legend, the modern teacher of the Children of the Sun came 

429 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

from the sea also, — an enthusiastic, hopeful young American who is 
officially rector of the university, but who, as town councilor and even 
mayor, has been responsible for most of the local improvements of 
recent years. For all the labors of Ingasman, the town was probably 
not noted for its immaculateness before the Conquest; to-day it is of 
that stagnant, Latin-American temperament that can be set in motion 
only by some external force. Thus we have the anomaly of seeing that 
" picturesqueness," so often closely allied to uncleanliness, which Amer- 
icans travel to Cuzco to see, being constantly reduced by one of their 
own race. Yet the influence of a single individual, however energetic, 
is limited; hence one must still be circumspect in inspecting old walls 
and Inca ruins, and the wise man always boils his water on the banks 
of the stinking Huatenay. 

Of the old Inca race there remain few traces. The vast majority 
of the 20,000 cuzquenos are " descendants of the Incas " only in the 
loose acceptance of that phrase. For want of a proper name the 
people of Tavantinsuyo, the Four Corners of the Earth, have come 
to be called Incas, as the inhabitants of the United States are called 
Americans for lack of a national adjective. As a matter of fact, an 
inca was a member of the royal family, of which the Inca Ccdpac was 
the ruling chief. It is easy to imagine other peoples quarreling with 
the race over their name — to their supreme indifference — protesting 
that they, too, inhabited the Four Corners of the Earth, with the same 
right to the term as the tribes of Cuzco; and referring to the latter 
privately by something corresponding to " yanqui " or " gringo." 

The thick upper lip, wide nostrils, and broad face of the aboriginal 
race shows in some degree in all but a few cuzquenos ; those of full 
Indian blood still make up a large percentage of the population. The 
Cuzco Indian is a type by himself. His skin is darker, his manner 
more cringing, his gait more slinking, than his fellows elsewhere; 
the faces of both males and females have a brutalized expression 
that seems to mark them as the most degenerate of all the Andean 
tribes. Rumor has it that they retain some slight and sadly mixed 
traditions of Huayna Ccapac and of the days when the native Empire 
occupied this vast plateau; but they are extremely chary of sharing 
any information they may possess. The Inca rule of having dis- 
tinguishing costumes for each community still holds, especially in the 
matter of head-dress, and it is as easy for the initiated to recognize 
the birthplace of an Indian by his garments as to know a Hindu's 
caste from his turban. Many from the towns surrounding Cuzco wear 

430 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

knitted, tasseled caps of gay colors, with earlaps. Those of the city 
are noted for their " pancake " hats, common to both sexes. These 
are round disks of straw, covered with flannel or an imitation of 
velveteen, one side of faded black with spoke-like stripes of color 
or gilt braid, the other brilliant or dull red, according to its age, 
which is generally advanced. In fine weather this is worn black 
side up; in wet it is reversed. The women are invariably barefoot, 
the men usually so, or with at most a strip of leather to protect their 
soles ; except that old men who have once wielded the silver-mounted 
cane of authority over their section of the community uphold their 
dignity by wearing on Sundays and feast-days heavy, native shoes 
often with large buckles and always without socks. The women wear 
carelessly fastened blouses of coarse material, heavy skirts bunched 
about their waists, and a shawl fastened with one pin of large, fanci- 
ful head. The men dress in tight, ragged knee-breeches or loose, 
shoddy trousers of varying lengths, and ponchos which prove that full 
use is made of the little packages of crude analine dyes sold in the 
market-square. 

The quiet of this chief gathering-place is unusual. It has no clatter, 
but only a suppressed hum; for the Indian of Cuzco is as silent as he 
is inoffensive. Here huge strawberries are sold at twenty-five cents a 
hundred, the primitive-minded female vendors counting them out by 
tens in hissing Quichua sibilants. The hot country is only a day's 
tramp from Cuzco; hence tropical as well as temperate fruits, are 
displayed, though often sadly crushed and maltreated by their trans- 
portation in sacks or nets on human backs. The Indians are here the 
same beasts of burden as elsewhere in the Andes. It is no uncommon 
thing to see a rather small man trot the mile from market to railway 
station with half a beef on his back. The wooden-headedness of the 
aboriginal, as well as his lack of strength for any labor except carrying, 
is often in evidence. I saw one ordered to take an iron wheelbarrow 
to another part of town. He removed the wheel and bound it on his 
wife's back with a llama-hair rope, slung the rest on his own shoulders 
in the same manner, and away they trotted one behind the other. 

When all is said and done the Andean Indian remains an enigma 
to the foreigner. At the end of a year of constant intercourse with 
him the traveler can quickly sum up his real knowledge of a race 
whose internal workings he has only guessed, confessing an inability 
to see from the aboriginal's point of view, to be aware with his con- 
sciousness. There is an enormous difference between the South Amer- 

43i 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

ican Indian and the bearers of the same misnomer in our own country. 
The majority of our tribes were warriors, with an obstinate courage 
that took little account of odds. They could be killed ; they could never 
be enslaved to a degree that made them profitable servants. From 
Tehuantepec southward, on the other hand, the aboriginals are noted 
for a subservience, not to say timidity, that made it possible for the 
Spaniards to exploit them ruthlessly, as do their descendants to this 
day. Was this characteristic the result or the cause of the govern- 
ment under which the Conquistadores found them? Ruled by the 
Incas in a far more autocratic form of imperialism than the worst 
known to-day, carrying authority into the very depths of their cabins 
and the most personal conduct of their lives, the Indians of the Andes 
were robbed of all initiative — granting that they ever possessed any — 
and became the most passive of human creatures. Having imbued 
their subjects with a sort of fatalism, a non-resistance to anything 
they conceived as authority, above all by convincing them of their 
own divine origin, the Incas made their conquest by the Spaniards 
easy ; for the credulous masses readily accepted these bearded strangers 
as Children of the Sun also, to whom any resistance would be absurd. 
Thus must all false doctrines prove in time a boomerang to those who 
foster them. 

To-day the domination once held by the Incas has been taken over 
by the priests, public functionaries, and the patron, whose wills are 
obeyed without question. In the eyes of the Indian the priest is the 
representative of God on earth, to whom he must show absolute sub- 
mission and obedience, as to one who holds the key to that place of 
primitive joys and freedom from the sorrows and hardships of this 
world to which he conceives death to lead. That the priest may be 
harsh and unkindly, or worse, has nothing to do with the case. Even 
the God of his conception is cruel and vengeful, taking pleasure in 
bringing down misfortunes on his head, and to be placated by any 
means in his power. Were priest and authorities true to their mis- 
sions, their domination over the Indian might be advantageous. Too 
often they are quite the contrary. The authorities are disdainful, look- 
ing upon their positions merely as opportunities for personal gain ; the 
priest is less often a shepherd than a wolf preying upon his flock with 
impunity. Too often priest and authorities join together to exploit 
the aboriginal with liquor and church festivals, his only recreations, at 
times even inventing the latter to make an excuse for exploitation. 
Whatever he may once have been, the Indian of the Cordillera is a 

432 



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THE CITY OF THE SUN 

child, to be governed by a kindly father, as the Incas seem to some 
extent to have been. The civilization which the Spaniard is reputed to 
have brought him is nothing of the sort. Garsilaso assures us that the 
masses were little better than domestic animals, even at the time of 
the Conquest. They were certainly in no worse state than to-day. 
That he should have remained or fallen so low is difficult for us of 
the hopeful United States to understand; it would be more easily 
understood in India with its fixed castes, or even in England, where 
certain boys are born with the necessity of lifting their caps to certain 
other boys. His stolidity passes all conception. He is native to, and 
of a piece with, the pampa, the bare, treeless upland world where the 
dreary expanse of brown earth and cold blue sky incites neither am- 
bition nor friendliness, neither hopes nor aspirations. Hence his flat, 
joyless face with its furtive eyes suggests a soul contracted upon 
itself, an aridity of sentiments, an absolute lack of aesthetic affec- 
tions. Passively sullen, morose, and uncommunicative, he neither de- 
sires nor aspires, and loves or abhors with moderation. The native 
language is scanty and cold in terms of endearment; I have never 
seen the faintest demonstration of affection between Indians of the 
two sexes, though plenty of evidence of bestial lust. Even his music 
is a monotonous wailing, an interminable sob on a minor key. He 
lacks will-power, perseverance, confidence, either in himself or others, 
and has a profound abhorrence of any ways that are not his ways. 
He works best in " bees," with the beating of a drum, the wail of a 
quena, and frequent libations of chicha to cheer him on, as, no doubt, 
in the days of the Incas. He is noted for long-distance endurance; 
yet this is not so great as is commonly fancied. Like an animal, he 
cannot go " on his nerve/' or will not, which amounts to the same 
thing. Try to hurry him and it will be found that he needs fifteen 
days rest each month, like the llama. 

From his earliest years the Andean Indian forms a conception of 
life as something sinister and painful. As a baby, as soon as another 
uncomplaining little creature usurps his place on the maternal back, 
he is shut up in some noisome patio or hut, along with chickens, 
guinea-pigs, and new-born sheep, with which he fights for his scanty 
fare of a handful of toasted corn. Rolling about in his own filth and 
that of the animals, who now and again all but outdo him in combat, 
he reaches the age of four or five, and then begins his life-long 
struggle with hostile nature. In the country he takes to shepherding 
the family pigs, then a flock of sheep of the patron, learning the 

433 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

use of the sling and to wail mournful ditties on his reed fife. Here, 
with no other covering than a coarse homespun garment open to the 
waist and barely reaching the knees, he sits day after day contemplating 
the dreary expanse of puna, until its very nothingness turns to melan- 
choly in his soul. In town he is " farmed out," or virtually sold into 
slavery to some family, learning a few ways of the whites, some 
Castilian, which he commonly refuses to talk later in life, and also 
the injustice of man, or the habit of considering himself too low to 
be reached by justice. When he is older, and grown superstitious 
with listening to the tales of the yatiris, his labor is still heavier. He 
guides the clumsy wooden plow that is his notion of the last word 
in mechanical inventions, or carries donkey-loads on his back. Nature 
yields only to hard struggle and great perseverance in tilling the sterile 
soil; the sun is parsimonious with its warmth; the very fuel of dung 
costs hard labor to gather on these treeless heights. Or perhaps the 
authorities come to carry him off to serve as a soldier of a country 
he hardly knows the existence of, probably to die of the diseases 
engendered in his over-developed lungs in the dreaded lowlands of 
coast or montana. People of scanty, inclement soil, mountaineers 
in general, are canny and lacking in generosity by nature; add to 
this that he was forbidden the use of money under the Incas, and 
it is small wonder the Indian will give or sell his meager produce 
only by force. Tight-fisted and frugal, he lives for days on a handful 
of parched corn and his beloved coca, of the depressing effect of 
which he has no notion. To sleep he needs only the hard ground, 
be it in his own hut or out under the shivering stars, using perhaps 
a stone as pillow, if there be one within easy reach. He is a tireless 
pedestrian; his corneous hoofs are impervious to the roughest going; 
he sets out on whatever journey fate or his masters assign him, 
knowing that if he lives he will some day come back to the point of 
departure. For he has an irrepressible love for his native spot, the 
mud den where he was born, however miserable or inclement, and 
will not abandon his home permanently under any circumstances. If 
he does not return, it is because some misfortune has overtaken him 
on the trail. 

The woman lives the same life from babyhood ; and in some ways 
her duties are still more onerous. Rude and torpid as the male, she 
neither conceives nor possesses any of those softer qualities peculiar 
to her sex. When trouble overtakes her she does not complain, but 
suffers and weeps — if at all — alone, an utter stranger to pity in 

434 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

either its passive or active form. Strong as a draft-horse, she knows 
none of the infirmities to which modern civilized woman is subject. 
She gives birth to a child virtually every year, often from the age 
of fifteen on, without any species of preparation or precaution, washes 
it in the nearest brook, slings it on her back, and goes on about her 
business. 

The husbandman of the puna plants a few potatoes, a little quinoa, 
perhaps some barley, clinging to the primitive ways of his ancestors to 
remote generations. A good harvest does not depend upon proper 
planting or fertilization, but on the changes of the moon and stars, 
and the propitiation of the fetishes to which he still secretly gives 
his adherence in spite of his ostensible conversion to Christianity. 
He considers himself a being apart from the governing class, refer- 
ring to himself as " gente natural " and to his superiors as " gente 
blanca," as our southern negroes distinguish between " white folks " 
and " colored folks." He takes no part whatever in political matters, 
rarely indeed having any conception of the country to which he belongs. 
Anything which does not touch him personally he looks upon with 
profound indifference and disdain. He is submissive as a brute, lives 
without enthusiasms, without ambitions, in a purely animal passivity 
that is the despair of those who are moved to an attempt to better 
his lot. 

Some knowledge of Quichua is essential to intercourse with the 
mass of the population of Cuzco, as it is to the convenience of the 
lone traveler down the Andes. Even in the city a large number of 
the " gente del pueblo " cannot, or will not, speak Spanish ; in the 
villages round about it is a rare man who has a suggestion of Cas- 
tilian. All classes, on the other hand, speak the aboriginal tongue, 
by necessity if not by choice. The majority, indeed, imbibe it with 
their nurse's milk, learning Spanish as an alien language later in 
life. A professor of the local university, boasting a Ph.D., assured 
me that he did not know a word of Castilian when he first entered 
school at the age of seven. After the revolt of Tupac Amaru an edict 
was promulgated prohibiting the use of Quichua, as it did the native 
costume, and even commanded that all musical instruments of the 
aboriginals be destroyed; but like many a Spanish-American law this 
was never strictly enforced. To-day Cuzco is the Florence of Qui- 
chua, where it has retained its purest form, least influenced by the 
Spanish, and there are many persons of high social standing, the 
women especially, who speak it by preference. 

435 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

It is typical of the Latin-American that those things which are of 
the soil, and have been familiar since childhood, are treated with con- 
tempt, are considered inferior to anything possessing the glamor of 
distance. Thus Quichua, like all survivals of " los Gentiles," is looked 
down upon by the " cultured " caste throughout the Andes as some- 
thing appertaining to the lower classes, to be avoided as diligently 
as manual labor. " Vulgarly speaking " is the expression with which 
the cane-carrying Peruvian apologetically prefaces any use of the 
native tongue. " No se dice allco, se dice perro," a mother re- 
proves the child that points to a dog with a lisp of the aboriginal 
word. But as usual, environment is more powerful than maternal 
desires, and the child grows more fluent in the speech of the Indians 
than in the aristocratic Spanish. The tendency to scorn it seems a 
pity to the traveler, for the ancient tongue is certainly worth pre- 
serving, and its preservation depends chiefly on Cuzco. The Ameri- 
can Rector of the University has done much to reassure the town 
on the importance of its mission in this respect. Already much has 
been lost. The best quichuaist in town did not know the words for 
boat or island, though these are familiar enough wherever any body 
of water exists in the Andes. Shortly before my arrival the ancient 
drama " Ollantay " had been performed, and was found to contain 
many words which even those whose mother-tongue is Quichua did 
not understand. As the quipus, or knotted strings, was the only 
form of writing known to the Incas, authoritative interpretation has 
been lost with the quipumayos who were trained to read them. The 
tongue of to-day has suffered much admixture, many Spanish words 
having been " quichuaized " when there was no necessity for it, until 
there remains a language as bastardized as the " German " of rural 
Pennsylvania. Not a few have a distinctly hazy notion of the line 
between the two tongues. " Medio," said Alejandro, my one-eyed 
hotel servant, " is Quichua, and ' cinco centavos ' is Spanish." How 
should he know which was which of the two languages he had spoken 
from childhood, neither of which he could read nor write? There is 
less excuse for the assurance of persons of some education that " asno " 
is Quichua and " burro " Spanish, completely overlooking the fact that 
the Conquistadores brought not only the donkey, but both names, 
with them. Now and again some expression from the lips of an Indian 
quaintly recalls the history of the Peruvians and their two-branch 
ancestry to remote generations. " Ojala, Dios pagarasunqui ! " for in- 
stance is a mixture of Arabic, Spanish, and Quichua in as many words. 

43 6 







The first view of Cuzco, at the point where all Indians, male or female, going or coming, 

pause and, uncover and, looking down upon the City of the Sun below, 

murmur, "Oh, Cuzco, Great City, I salute thee!" 




It requires at least three persons to shoe a horse cr mule, as it does to milk a cow, in 

the Andes. Ordinarily the blacksmith is not so bold as this one, but stands 

at arm's-length from the hoof. In the background is one of the 

many old Inca walls on which the modern dwellings 

of Cuzco are superimposed 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

Yet after all, the ancient tongue of the Incas, variously called 
Quichua, Quechua, and Keshua (with the most guttural of sounds), 
has survived to a greater extent than any other American dialect. 
Some have called it " Runa Simi," or general language of the common 
people; but the quichuaists of Cuzco insist that it is rather the Inca 
or court language that has remained. Garsilaso complained that even 
in the time of the Incas there was a " confusion and multitude of 
tongues," with a new dialect almost every league. He who has at- 
tempted to make his way down the Andes on a fixed vocabulary will 
recognize the justice of this plaint. Before we left Panama, Hays and 
I had made up a lexicon, only to find that all but the commonest 
words changed so often that it was of little value. What is called 
Quichua is spoken more or less continuously from Quito to southern 
Bolivia, with scatterings through northern Argentine. But the dia- 
lects of Ayacucho, Huancayo, the valley of Ancachs, and especially 
of Cajamaca and further north, include many terms which the purists 
of Cuzco will not grant an honest pedigree. Only in the ancient 
capital has it retained anything like the original pronunciation, with 
those " sounds harsh and disagreeable to our ears " which Garsilaso 
sought to soften with editorial license. Philologists assure us that 
the language rose in the north and moved southward, citing the use 
of more archaic terms in the more southern dialects; for example 
yacu, which is water in the north, is flowing water, or river, in the 
south, where unu designates the liquid. The spread of Quichua has 
been attributed to culture rather than conquest, that is, it was adopted 
by new tribes coming under the Inca influence, not because it was 
forced upon them, but because it afforded a more perfect means of com- 
munication than their primitive dialects. 

It is a real language, with complete grammar and all the flexibility 
and shades of expression of our classical tongues. Philologists have 
attempted in vain to represent its sounds by Roman letters or com- 
binations thereof, even by inventing new characters. But these are 
makeshifts at best, and the pronunciation can only be learned by prac- 
tice in its native land. Roughly speaking, it includes all the letters 
of the Spanish alphabet except b, d, f, g, j,v, x, and z. But many of 
those remaining must be doubled or otherwise modified to represent 
sounds unknown to European tongues. L is rare, while the sound 
represented by the Spanish 11 is frequent ; there is no rr, but r is much 
used. Harsh in its phonetics, it has a suggestion of the Chinese in 
that three pronunciations of the same word, labial, palatal, or throaty, 

437 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

give it quite different meanings. The traveler who pauses in the trail 
to call out " Cancha acca?" to an Indian hut displaying the white 
flag that announces chicha for sale, would say something quite dif- 
ferent than he intended if he gave the cc the sound represented by 
the single c. The accent is nearly always on the penult, lending the 
speech a fixed and almost monotonous rhythm. Technically speaking, 
Quichua is aglutinative, that is, formed by the tacking on of suffix 
after suffix, until in some cases an entire sentence consists of a single 
word, making it possible to express fine shades of meaning fully 
equal to the Spanish with its diminutives and affixes. It has no 
articles, no genders (at least expressed), no individual prepositions, 
and has virtually only one verb conjugation. The plural is formed by 
adding cana; the six cases, corresponding to the Latin, by suffixes. 
Thus hitarma is boy, huarmacuna, boys ; huarmacunacta is the accusa- 
tive, huarmacunamanta, of the boys. In like manner the genitive is 
formed by combination; acca is chicha, huasi, house, and accahuasi, 
tavern. The doubling of words gives a collective and often quite dif- 
ferent meaning; thus rumi is stone, rumirumi, a stony place; runa is 
man, runaruna, a crowd ; quina is bark, quinaquina, the medicinal bark 
from which we get quinine, as well as the name thereof. Its system of 
counting is built up on the fingers, as in all languages, but is some- 
what cumbersome in larger combinations — which none of the ignorant 
Indians of to-day are capable of using. Thus 299 is iscaypachac- 
chuncaiscconniyoc! 

As in the case of all more or less primitive languages, Quichua is 
often anamatopoetic, — its words formed from sounds connected 
with the object expressed. Why the animal we miscall guinea-pig 
should be cut (kwee) to the natives of the Andes no one who has 
shivered through a night in an Indian hut listening to the falsetto, 
grunting squeak of those irrepressible little creatures will wonder; 
why a baby is a guagua (wawa) none need ask. As in most lan- 
guages, mama is mother; on the other hand, father is tata, or tayta; 
the newcomer finds papa already in use to designate potato, as it 
has come to in all Spanish-America, as well as in Andalusia. The 
primitive origin of the Inca tongue is further demonstrated by many 
crudities of expression, and an indelicacy in the use of certain terms 
that have been banished from polite intercourse among European na- 
tions. Nnstahispana, or penccacny (shame) are cases in point. Mar- 
riage-time is Huarmihapiy pacha, literally, " the time to chase a woman." 
It is natural that many more aboriginal words should have survived 

438 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

and become a part of the general language in a land where the Indians 
have survived themselves, than in one where the race has been virtu- 
ally wiped out, or at least set apart, as with us. Hence the language 
of Spanish-America is much richer than our own in terms from the 
aboriginal tongue. The ignorant Spanish Conquistadores. as devoid of 
" language sense " as the most uncouth American " drummer," gave 
many of the native words queer twists; to their untrained ears 
Anti sounded like Andes, tampu like tambo, pampa like bamba, and 
Biru like Peru. Yet Quichua has enriched even the languages of the 
world at large with many words, such as llama, pampa, condor, and 
alpaca. 

A brief sample of the ancient tongue might not be amiss. Few 
works except the Bible have been printed in the vernacular; and this 
was done not that the Indians might read it, since there probably exists 
no man able to read Quichua who cannot also read Spanish, but for the 
use of missionaries and priests among the Andean tribes. Many 
words for which there existed no equivalent have, of course, been 
" quichuaized," and the letters retain their Spanish values. The para- 
ble of the man who built his house on sand instead of rock (St. 
Luke, VI, 48) runs: 

Ricchacun uc huasihacluc ccaryman; pi yallicta allpata allpisca cca- 
ccahuan tecsirkan. Inas paractin unu llocllapi yaicumurkan mayutac 
caparispa saccay huasiman choccacurkan mana cuyurichiyta atispa 
huasi ccaccapatapi tiactin. 

Cuzco, the last foothold of Spanish power on the American conti- 
nent, bids fair to be the last of popery also. Even Quito is little more 
fanatical. With the exception of Ayacucho, I found the former City 
of the Sun the only place in Peru where the priests were still per- 
mitted to advertise their spurious wares by an incessant thumping 
and hammering of all the discordant noise-producers of whatever tone 
or caliber or lack thereof, in her church towers, at any hour of 
day or night. There is a law against " unnecessary " ringing of 
church-bells in Peru ; but in this hotbed of fanaticism the prefect does 
not interpret his duties too severely. With a din that awoke the 
echoes of the distant mountain-flanks that shut her in, Cuzco sallied 
frequently forth in a long religious procession, not a single white man 
gracing it, except the priests. These latter did not permit the most 
solemn formalities to weigh heavily upon them. Even within the 
cathedral itself I have seen the chief padre, carrying the host or 
whatever it is, and marching with sanctimonious tread under his 

439 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

embroidered canopy, wrinkle up his lascivious countenance and half- 
surreptitiously make unbelievably scurrilous jokes with the priests close 
around him about the attractive girls of the pious, downcast audience. 

Peru has long been one of the most intolerant of nations, at least 
theoretically. Since the adoption of her constitution public worship 
by non-Catholics has been forbidden, its fourth article reading : " The 
nation professes the Catholic religion, Apostolic and Roman ; the state 
protects it, and does not permit the public exercise of any other." An 
attempt had recently been made to amend this to the extent of striking 
out the last clause. There has long been violation of the law. Lima 
has an Episcopal church of long standing and considerable congrega- 
tion, and as the membership is largely English and American, Peru 
has not risked a controversy with those countries by enforcing the 
constitution. In fact the strongest and chief argument of the sena- 
tors supporting the proposed amendment was not that liberty of cult 
is just, but that " the law is not being enforced anyway, so let 's change 
it." A very few grasped the fact that this is one of the many reforms 
needed to draw to Peru the immigration indispensable to her modern 
advancement. The fourteenth-century arguments of the hidebound 
clerical senators against the proposed change afforded reading com- 
pared to which the efforts of the world's chief humorists are staid and 
funereal. 

Great excitement broke out in the more " conservative " cities of 
the interior when the news came up from Lima. Headed by the 
archbishop, ecclesiastics of every grade issued orders to all fieles 
to combat " por cualquier medio — by any means whatever, this vile 
attack on the Holy Mother Church, the morality of the family, 
and the honor of Peru by the masones and ateistas of the Senate." 
From all the altiplanicie telegrams poured in, calling upon the sena- 
tors to suppress " this absurd resolution on the liberty of cults, un- 
natural to Peru and abhorred by all the faithful." Every scurrilous 
little Catholic organ — and the most outspoken "sage-bush" journal 
of our Southwest cannot approach these in vituperation and positive 
indecency of language in attacking their enemies — frothed with raging 
editorials. In Cuzco it was planned to parade the patron saint through 
the streets, ostensibly as a mere protest. A few years ago the bishop 
would have met the issue by calling together a few hundred of the 
most fanatical, filling them with concentrated courage, and preaching 
a careful sermon that would really have been an order to sack and 
kill the hated " liberals," though with a clever wording to clear his 

440 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

own skirts of the matter. Such things have often happened in Cuzco. 
This time a rumor that the procession was to be merely an excuse 
for the priests to incite their followers of dull complexion and under- 
standing to riot reached the students of the university. Though all 
are Catholics, these fiery " liberals " are ardent haters of priests ; 
only a few years before they had bodily flung the " clerical " faculty 
out of the institution. Now they secretly gathered revolvers and 
planned to lay in wait for some of the more fanatical priests when 
the procession started. Wind of this reached some one of higher 
authority and intelligence, the news was wired to Lima, and in the nick 
of time orders came to the prefect to forbid the parade. 

An amendment to the constitution in Peru requires the consent of 
two consecutive congresses and the signature of the president after 
each passage. A year later the amendment on the liberty of cult was 
carried and became law amid a scene of riot in the senate, during 
which a fanatical representative snatched the bill from the hands of a 
clerk and tore it to bits. 

It occurred to me one day that it might be unpatriotic to leave 
Cuzco without calling on the only American missionaries — except a 
lone preacher in Bogota — I had so far heard of in South America. 
On the edge of town I found my way at length into a mud- 
walled compound of some fifteen acres, with fat green alfalfa, an 
exotic windmill, and a two-story mansion surrounded by flower-plots. 
I had paused near what seemed to be the main door, and stood gazing 
admiringly at the wall that shut out all the troubles of this rude 
world, when a window opened and a lean man of forty, his mission 
plainly imprinted on his gaunt features, a finger between the leaves 
of a hymn-book, put out his head and murmured, " Buenas tardes." 

"Is this Mr. ?" I asked in English. 

" It is." 

" Well, I just happened to be in town and thought I 'd. . . . But 
no doubt you are very busy. . . ." 

" Yes, I am busy," came the reply, in a bona fide missionary voice, 
"but don't let that keep you from coming in — if you want to." 

Naturally I grasped so urgent an invitation with both hands. 

" Oh, no," I protested, " I would n't think of disturbing you. I '11 
stay out here and look at the scenery." 

"Yes, look at the scenery," replied the urgent gentleman, as he 
and the hymn-book disappeared behind the closed window. 

Inside arose sounds not unlike a Methodist meeting, and I had 

441 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

begun to wander stealthily away when the door opened and the mis- 
sionary's more cordial better half informed me that they were not 
" holding services." Reassured, I entered the cozy parlor. Two 
women and a man were gathered about a diminutive melodeon, singing 
mournful hymns. Naturally, at sight of me the musicians lost their 
nerve, and the cheerful pastime came to a standstill. In due time I 
discovered that the youthful organist had just been shipped down fresh 
and untarnished from a Canadian theological seminary, to " bring the 
poor Peruvians to Christ." His qualifications for that feat were that 
he had not, up to his arrival, seen a printed page of Spanish, had 
never heard of Quichua or Pizarro, and though he did remember 
the name Prescott, he " did n't know he had written about foreign 
countries." I found that Peyrounel, he of the maidenly hair, chestful 
of medals, and andarin reputation, had lived a month at the mission 
the year before, having posed as a poor persecuted Huguenot among 
bloodthirsty Catholics. He had filled the scanty imaginations of the 
group with so many wild tales of the road that I could not refrain 
from giving my own inventiveness vent, and at the end of a dozen 
bloodcurdling episodes the fresh young product of the seminary re- 
marked in a ladylike voice, " That must have been quite interesting." 
Looked at from that point of view, perhaps he was right. In the 
early days of their mission the ladies had been received and called 
on socially by the haughtiest of their sex in Cuzco. But they had 
soon been ostracized, not because of their religion — or, from the 
Cuzco point of view, lack thereof — but because, having been detected 
in the act of sweeping out their own parlor, it was concluded that 
they were cholas in their own country and not fit to associate with 
gente decente. 

Unless the time of my stay there was exceptional, suicide is a la 
mode in Cuzco. Almost on the day of my arrival one bold youth of 
twenty-five decided to die because Seiiorita Fulana scorned his atten- 
tions. He wrote a long poem explaining to the disdainful damsel, 
and the world at large, why he was leaving life so early — it after- 
ward graced the contribution page of one of the local journals — and 
fired four revolver shots. One grazed his chest, a second tore a hole 
in the tail of his frock-coat, the third smashed a lamp on the mantel- 
piece, and the fourth scared the family cat off the divan. The date 
of the wedding was soon to be announced when I left Cuzco. Among 
the host of disciples of this heroic and enviable deed among the ex- 
citable juventud of Cuzco were several youth of like age, who at- 

442 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

tempted to imitate it from equally absurd motives. All carried the act 
to a more or less successful conclusion, except one who, either be- 
cause he took the matter too seriously, or neglected to practice before- 
hand, or because he was not a native cuzqueno, or had been reading 
Ibsen, shot himself through the temple. 

The subject of suicide leads us naturally to the cemetery. That of 
Cuzco celebrated a sort of " Decoration Day " during my stay. Pla- 
cards announced that " for reasons of hygiene " the alcalde permitted 
no one but actual mourners to visit it; but it is always easy to find 
something to mourn over in Peru. An endless stream of humanity 
was pouring in through the gate by which I entered, while a score 
of soldiers on guard stood drinking chicha, gambling, and making 
love. As in all Spanish countries, the corpses were pigeon-holed away, 
bricked in, and marked with the date on which the rent would fall 
due. With unlimited space about the city, it is hard to understand 
why the dead must be tucked away in this expensive fashion, except 
that the priests refuse to sprinkle with holy water those planted else- 
where. At the gate was posted a long list of corpses whose rent had 
run out, with the information that unless it was paid by the end 
of the month the contents would be dumped in the boneyard. 

A visit to any Latin-American cemetery is equal to sitting through 
a well-played comedy, so lacking is the native sense of propriety. 
Between the padlocked iron reja and the bulkhead of each grave is a 
narrow space which it is a la mode to fill with flowers. But as flower- 
pots are rare and expensive in Cuzco, there were substituted cans 
that had once held " Horiman's Tea," or " Smith's Mixed Pickles," 
many with gay labels adorned with the portraits of scantily clad ac- 
tresses of international notoriety still upon them. Here and there a 
family with a praiseworthy sense of economy had caused the grave- 
head to be marked with the brass name-plate that formerly graced 
the place of business of the deceased; others had " Renewed to 1918 " 
crudely scratched in the cement, bearing witness to an unusually 
tenacious grief on the part of the survivors — or to a well-drawn 
will. Many tombs were decorated with atrocious photographs of 
the occupant; others had verses — no doubt the author would call 
them poems — some printed, some laboriously hand-written, pasted 
against them and glassed over, like the photographs. Here and there 
the bulkhead of a well-to-do member of society was entirely covered 
by a painting depicting the untold grief of those left behind, — in 
most cases a picture of the coffin of the deceased, with a string of 

443 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

his male relatives and friends on one side and the female mourners 
opposite, all dressed in their most correct attire — or the best the 
painter could furnish them from his palette — and standing exact dis- 
tances apart in exactly the same attitude of weeping copiously into 
a large handkerchief a dos reales in any shop. Only, as the painter, 
who is seldom a direct descendant of Murillo, always paints in the 
eyes above the handkerchief, the impression conveyed is that the en- 
tire group is suffering from a bad cold, that the funeral was inad- 
vertently put off too long, or that each is keeping a worldly eye out 
for any suspicious move on the part of the others. 

The hospital of Cuzco is a part of the same structure as the ceme- 
tery, with a door between — a very foresighted and convenient ar- 
rangement for such a hospital. The building is roomy, but not much 
else can be said for it. Indians and half-Indians, male and female, lie 
closely packed together in long rows of aged cots along ill-ventilated 
halls. Hardy as seem these mountain Indians, once they are subjected 
to the changed life of the barracks, with food, clothing, and shoes 
to which they are riot accustomed, they succumb with surprising ease 
to a long list of ailments. From kitchen to drug-shop, from nurses to 
Indian servants, stalked that ubiquitous uncleanliness of the Andes. 
Several idiots and insane persons were confined in noisome dens un- 
worthy animal occupancy. In a dismal, half-underground corner a 
handsome, powerfully built young cholo lay on a heap of rags that con- 
stituted absolutely the only furnishings. He had been capellan of 
the cathedral, and whenever a church-bell rang — which was most of 
the time — he sprang up from the uneven earth floor and began to 
sing Latin hymns at the top of his voice, shaking and gnawing the 
heavy wooden bars that confined him. The four most deadly diseases 
of Cuzco, in their order, are typhoid, dysentery, tuberculosis, and 
smallpox. The doctors, physicians of the town who drop in casu- 
ally and hurriedly each morning, are paid $27.50 a month. La Su- 
periora dcaws $10, the first cook and the grave-diggers $5, general 
male servants $3.50, and female servants $2 a month, with food and 
a spot to lay their " beds " on. What they do with all that money 
I cannot say. The hospital cannot afford disinfectants, and when a 
surgical operation is to be performed the instruments are washed in 
hot water — if there happens to be fuel. Patients are allowed 13 
cents a day for food, employees, 15, and the woman in charge, 20. 

I visited most of the institutions of learning in Cuzco. The German 
head of the Colegio, or high school for boys, wore his cap and overcoat 

444 



o« 



o 







«rfl 




THE CITY OF THE SUN 

even in the class-rooms; and no one could have blamed him for it in 
this dismal rainy season. An army officer had been detailed as gymna- 
sium instructor, the national government requiring a certain amount of 
physical training of all students. He led the way to an earth-floored 
building in the rear, where the pupils took turns in falling over the 
crude apparatus without removing even their coats. To appear in 
shirt-sleeves, even in a gymnasium, would be an inexcusable breach 
of etiquette in South America. School ran from 8 to n, and from 
i to 5, with a ten-minute recess between each fifty-minute class, 
that must be spent in the corredor and not used in study. Among 
the students was one Juan Inca, of pure Indian type, and the great 
majority showed more or less aboriginal blood. The chemistry class, 
in a laboratory with a floor of unlevelled, trodden earth, had a 
peon to arrange the experiments for the professor, who performed 
most of them in person. Few of the students could be coaxed to 
soil their own never-washed hands in the interests of science, and 
those who broke or spilled anything were sure to cry out, " He, mucha- 
cho ! " — or more likely, " Yau, huarma," since in their excitement their 
native tongue came first to their lips — and in trotted an Indian boy 
to clean up the mess. The newly arrived limefio teacher, who had 
tried tq get them to do their own experiments, was informed that 
they were not peons. Yet nine tenths of them would have been 
run out of the least exacting American workshop for their evidences 
of avoiding the bath. It may be that the poor, proud fellows had no 
servants at home to take it for them. Upon his arrival the teacher had 
established the rule that, as his class began at I :io, any boy not in 
his seat by 1:11 would be reported tardy. The students sent a tele- 
gram of protest to the government in Lima, and word came back 
from the Minister of Education: 

"Professor , Colegio, Cuzco: Do not put too much stress on 

small and unimportant matters." 

As if there were any matter on which the Latin-American is more 
sadly in need of education ! 

The class miscalled " English " was in charge of a native youth who 
had spent a year in a well-known but not particularly famous institu- 
tion in our Middle West, unfortunately favored by most Cuzco youths 
permitted to top off their education in the United States. When I 
entered some sixty boys, of about the age at which the Latin- American 
begins precociously to turn rake, were floundering through some " I 
want a dog" sentences. The teacher's knowledge of his subject was 

445 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

such as might be gathered in the dormitories of that seat of Jesuitical 
learning above mentioned, but was not exactly what he might have 
learned had he been permitted to mingle with the profane outside 
world. It would not have been so bad had he been content to stick to 
his Cortina grammar, though his pronunciation was at best mirth- 
provoking. But like so many half-learned persons, he regarded him- 
self as the source of all wisdom and insisted on using his own judg- 
ment, when he possessed none. He was dictating dialogues between 
two American boys, and forcing his students to learn to mismumble 
them; just such expressions as we have all, no doubt, heard American 
boys use to each other daily. Here are a few of the gems I copied 
from the blackboard : 

" Mys cheek it is pinkes " — which had not even the doubtful virtue 
of being true. 

" By Gosh, Huzle up ! " The jesuited instructor had no doubt often 
heard this hasty, unLatin-American word in the dormitories, but hav- 
ing never chanced to see it in print, he had chosen his own spelling, with 
this happy result. 

" We now shall go to the exam." The longer word for that dis- 
tressing experience he seemed never to have heard. 

" My watch it goes too fast." 

" At your service, John, thank you. What are the news ? " Sev- 
eral students made the error of using a singular verb in this sentence, 
but they were quickly and sarcastically reminded that the noun news 
ends in an s, which any fool knows is a sign of the plural in English, 
as in Spanish. 

" I shall long for you after you are gone away " ; the blackboard con- 
tinued, and so on, always with a distinctly home-made pronunciation. 
The traveler can scarcely blame himself if he does not understand his 
native tongue when it is shouted after him in the streets of Cuzco by 
the proud students of the Colegio. 

The higher institution is the ancient University of Cuzco, founded 
nearly a half-century before our oldest, and occupying the great stone 
cloisters of the former Jesuit monastery. A young and enthusiastic 
American rector has done much to give it new impulse ; but one man 
single-handed cannot reform the Latin-American character. Its 160 
students from the four surrounding departments have increased both 
in numbers and diligence since the " conservative " professors were 
thrown out, but their point of view is still not exactly that of our own 
college men. Among others I attended a class on " Special Literature." 

446 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

It was a third-year course, of seven students ; the hour, from three to 
four. I arrived at 3:15 and found the professor, a Ph.D. (Cuzco) 
whose wide nostrils, broad face, and prominent cheek bones proved him 
chiefly of aboriginal blood, pacing up and down the second-story corre- 
dor smoking a cigarette. At 3 120 a white youth of about twenty-three, 
with a mustache, drifted languidly across the patio swinging his cane. 
He and the professor bowed low, shook hands, exchanged the unavoid- 
able " Buenas tardes, sefior. Como esta usted ? Como esta. la f am- 
ilia? " lifted their hats, and at length broke the clinch. The professor 
produced from his pocket a massive key and opened a cubical, white- 
washed room, having installed himself in which, he began to " lecture " 
on Calderon de la Barca. At 3 :28 a half-Indian student stamped into 
the room and interrupted the proceedings with a loud " Buenas tardes, 
seflor," causing the professor to lose the thread of his discourse for a 
minute or more. When the interruption had subsided, he continued 
to lecture, pausing now and then to look at his outline notes, more 
often to inhale the smoke of the cigarette he still held backward be- 
tween his fingers. The white youth soon fell asleep, woke as his head 
dropped, spat on the floor, and then frankly and openly laid his head 
back against the wall and slept. The other half of the class sat with 
the filmy, half-closed eyes of a man who is dreaming of his cholita 
of not too unobliging morals in some hut on the outskirts of town. 
It would have been ill-bred of the professor, and galling to the " pride " 
of his class, to have waked them. He finished his cigarette and droned 
unbrokenly on. At 3:46 another haughty half-Indian, his silver- 
headed cane held at the approved Parisian angle, broke in upon the 
lecture with a greeting, which the professor interrupted his remarks to 
acknowledge. At 3 150 he took advantage of the awakening caused 
by the new arrival to begin a quiz, asking. the white student some- 
thing about the subject of his discourse. The usual long preliminary 
sparring for wind in the form of " Ah-oh-ah, Sefior Don Pedro Calde- 
ron de la Garca, one of the most important authors of his epoch in 
Spain," and so through a long list of stock phrases, was followed by a 
mumbling of some vague and general rubbish he could easily have 
framed up had he not known whether Sefior Don Pedro was man, 
woman, or priest. When he had said nothing for about two minutes, 
one of the others was given the floor — no doubt the professor 
apologized later for being obliged to call upon them because of the 
presence of a distinguished foreign visitor — and launched forth in 
another set of phrases. Like the other, he did not know the title of any 

447 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

of Calderon's dramas, who left only a hundred or two to choose from, 
though the class had " studied " several of those works during the 
year's course. After each question the professor broke in upon the 
meaningless mumble to answer his query himself, and as he named the 
works one by one, the student cried out each time with a great display 
of wisdom, " Ah, si, senor ! " " Es verdad, sefior ! " as he would have 
done had the former inadvertently included " Quo Vadis " or 
" Evangeline." At 3 156 the professor carefully called the roll to find 
out how many of the seven were present, entered that important fact 
on an official blank to be left with the rector at the end of the day, and 
with much bowing and ceremonious formality the class took leave of 
themselves, lighted their cigarettes, tucked their canes under their 
arms, and faded away. 

Having long wished to attend a trial, I carried a note of introduction 
to a judge of the supreme court of the department of Cuzco. 

" Trial ? Certainly, senor. When do you wish to see one ? " 

" Any time there happens to be one." 

" Choose for yourself." 

" Well, shall we say Wednesday, at one ? " 

" It shall be done. I shall have something of importance arranged 
for you. How would this new burglary case do ? Or the recent sui- 
cide? The burglary? Very good, then, senor; Wednesday at one. 
Su servidor, adios, caballero." 

Luckily there were cases pending, thus sparing the judge the trouble 
of having to arrange to have the crime committed. 

Jury trial is unknown in Peru, as in most, if not all Spanish-America. 
In the first place, if the uncle of the accused is a compadre, or his 
nephew a padrino or a nineteenth cousin of the father-in-law of the 
judge or anyone else high in authority, the chances are that the matter 
will be dropped. Favored with none of these advantages, he must let 
the law take its rigorous, snail-like course. The trial is entirely on 
paper, back in the recesses of some dingy office. The one I entered 
at the hour and day set reminded me of some scene from the pages of 
Dickens. I was bowed to an ancient couch at one side of the dismal 
adobe room, the secretary, in an aged overcoat of various degrees of 
fadedness and an enormous neck muffler, sitting at a medieval table. 
My friend, the " Judge of the First Instance," in sartorial splendor, sat 
at another, his silk hat upside down before him. He had " arranged " 
the case of an Italian shopkeeper who had been robbed the Saturday 
before. The Italian, being summoned, entered, bowed, remained 

448 




i 




H 

V. ° 



° 5 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

standing, gave his name, age, religion, and other personal details, took 
the oath. Then he told his story in his own words to the judge, who 
asked questions but made no attempt at cross-examination, rather help- 
ing the witness in his answers when he stumbled or paused for want 
of a Spanish word. Meanwhile the secretary busied himself with roll- 
ing and consuming innumerable cigarettes. When he had finished his 
tale, the Italian was shown for the purpose of identification some arti- 
cles sent over from the Intendencia as taken from the prisoner's pocket, 
after which they still remained " in the hands of justice." Then the 
witness sat down and the judge himself dictated the story in his own 
words to the secretary. The latter armed himself with a steel pen, 
dipped it incessantly into a viceregal ink-well, and peering over the top 
of his glasses, laboriously wrote in a copy-book hand three words at 
a time, repeating them aloud. Shorthand is unknown in the govern- 
ment offices of the Andes. It would be too much to ask a political 
henchman to learn stenography, or anything else, for the mere purpose 
of holding a government position; typewriters are expensive; more- 
over, typewritten documents are not legal in most governmental for- 
malities; so ultra-modern a system would be lacking in dignity for 
such solemn purposes, and its introduction would require new effort 
on the part of secretaries whose only asset is the medieval art of pen- 
manship. The endless task over and the Italian dismissed, one of the 
prisoners, a half-breed boy of eighteen, of degenerate type, was brought 
in by an Indian soldier and " testified " in the same manner as the plain- 
tiff had done. He was not required to take the oath, but was warned 
to tell the truth. Again it was his own story, just as he chose to tell 
it, with no attempt to trip him up, and even occasional assistance. 
This the judge redictated in his own more cultured language, that the 
archives of Cuzco should not be marred by the undignified speech of 
the masses ; and the " trial " was over. A deaf-mute wished to testify 
in the case, but as there are no schools in Peru for those so afflicted, 
there was no one who could understand him. 

In short, a trial in Spanish-America consists of nothing but the 
making of affidavits, there called declaraciones. These are seen only 
by the judge, not even the prisoner's lawyer being permitted — legally 
— access to them. Later, if there is found time for it, comes the 
sumario in which the judge reads in his private study the various 
declarations and passes judgment and sentence, likewise in privacy, 
which sentence must be reviewed by the Superior Court of the De- 
partment. The curious may ask where the lawyer for the prisoner 

449 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

comes in. I was informed that " he sees the prisoner first and tells him 
what to say in his declaration." Thus is the secret, mysterious " jus- 
tice " of Latin- America, " a joke at so much a word," as they call it in 
Ecuador, administered. If one has a man arrested, one must hire a 
lawyer to find out what happened to him. 

I next went with the judge, in his gleaming stovepipe hat and sur- 
rounded by his suite of courtiers, to the prison on the banks of the 
noisome Huatenay. The departmental place of confinement consisted 
of an old-fashioned Spanish dwelling built around a large courtyard, 
a dismal patio in which were gathered prisoners from all parts of 
Peru's largest department, from white men of the capital to half-wild 
Indians of the montana, who know so little of the ways of government 
that they thought they were being held by their tribal enemies. Every- 
one was doing whatever he chose, with a freedom from restraint that 
recalled the debtors' prisons of England a century ago. As in most 
Latin-American penal institutions, there was no evidence of cruelty 
or unkindness to inmates, except the passive cruelty of neglect, most 
of the outward forms of courtesy being kept up between officials and 
prisoners. By night the latter slept in mud cells of the rambling adobe 
building, on earth floors as bare as those of an Indian hut unless, like 
the traveler in the Sierra, they brought their own " beds " with them. 
No food worthy the name was furnished. Outside the patio, sepa- 
rated from it by a massive iron wicket, were the wives, temporary or 
otherwise, of the prisoners, who had brought them dinner in baskets, 
pots, or knotted cloths. This custom of having the judge visit the 
place of confinement is not without its advantages ; at least, it gives him 
a personal knowledge of what a sentence means. As long as we re- 
mained, a constant line of prisoners crowded around my companion 
to tell their grievances. Those who wore hats carried them in their 
hands, but the cringing Indians, who mumbled their complaints in 
Quichua, did not remove their earlap " skating " caps. The petitioners 
ranged all the way from four " wildmen " from the hot-lands to the 
east, to a white and well-educated youth who began: 

" Your Honor excuses me, but I have now been here seven months, 
and if you could be pleased to arrange that they have my trial some 
day before long. . . ." 

It is a short but rather breathless climb in this altitude from the 
level of the town to the ancient fortress of Sacsahuaman, frowning 
down upon Cuzco from 700 feet above. On the city side the hill hangs 
almost precipitous, the town piled part way up it; but a flanking road 

450 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

soon brings one out beside the most massive monument of aboriginal 
art on the American continent. The cyclopean ruins are, as Garsilaso 
put it, " rather cliffs than walls," and how these enormous boulders, of 
which mathematicians compute the largest to weigh a little matter of 
360 tons, were set in position on this lofty headland by a race that 
knew neither horses nor oxen will ever remain as great a mystery as 
the building of the pyramids. Only one thing is certain; that the 
builders had unlimited labor at their command and that time was no 
object. Prescott's " so finely wrought it was impossible to detect the 
line of junction between the rocks " is scarcely true ; the detection is 
more than easy. But it is hard to believe these monster walls were 
constructed by the ancestors of the stolid and ambitionless Indians one 
sees to-day peddling their wares in the market-place of Cuzco. These 
downtrodden descendants take the amazing works of their forebears 
for granted, as we accept the constructions of nature, and never dream 
of attempting to imitate them. Indeed, many contend that they were 
not built, but grew up by enchantment. Nations, like individuals, have 
enthusiasm and initiative for great enterprises in their youth, and are 
apt to settle down to contentment with the mediocre in middle age, 
which there are hints that the race we roughly call Inca had reached at 
the time of the Conquest. The massive triple walls of the fortress 
were built in zigzag form, with salient angles from which the defenders 
within could fall upon their enemies, making it sufficient protection to 
the Imperial city without the necessity of surrounding that with walls. 
Even after the effete modern inhabitants have tumbled all the stones 
they could move down into the city to build their own temples and 
dwellings — the efforts of Lilliputians among giants — and despite the 
damage wrought by ruthless treasure-hunters, the main portion of the 
great fortress of Sacsahuaman still remains intact, to bring upon the 
beholder a rage that Pizarro and his fellow-tramps should have de- 
stroyed, like bulls in a china-shop, the Empire that wrought such mar- 
vels, a wonder at what might have been had the Conquest of Peru never 
taken place. 

In ancient days, whenever the son of an Inca put a bent pin of 
champi in the Imperial chair the resulting box on the ear must have 
been accompanied with a " Here, you aslla supay, go out and carve 
another step in that boulder ! " There is no other rational explanation 
of the mutilation which every rock and ground-stone for a circuit of 
many miles around the City of the Sun suffered before the Conquest. 
Everywhere huge, house-large rocks, dull-gray in color, are fantasti- 

451 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

cally carved in every imaginable form, with seats, crannies, grottoes, 
and stairways, as if for mere whim or amusement. There was no 
" scamping " of work in those days, no " good enough " to the straw 
bosses of the Incas, only one grade, — the perfect. The hardest rock 
is cut with exquisite care and finish, the angles perfectly sharp, the 
flat parts smooth as if cast in a mould. To the modern inhabitants 
every such carved seat is a " throne of the Incas " — as if the Inca had 
nothing to do but sit around admiring the widespread view from those 
aerial points of vantage of which his dynasty was so fond. The 
imagination likes to picture him watching athletic games on the little 
plain before Sacsahuaman, and chuckling behind his Imperial mask 
at the antics of children sliding down the Rodadero, or toboggan-stone, 
as do still those youths of Cuzco who are low enough in caste not to 
jeopardize their dignity by such antics. 

Over behind the ruins and carved rocks I found all the provincial 
" authorities " gathered one Sunday to uncover another of the many 
immense boulders that had lain for centuries disguised as a mound of 
earth. The gobernadores and tenientes, in more or less " European " 
garb, confined their labor to bossing ; the actual work was done by the 
alguaciles, jealously clinging to their silver-mounted staffs of office, 
even as they toiled. The digging brought to light not only another 
huge, fantastically carved ground-rock, but a hint of how Sacsahuaman 
might have been built. The Incas had but to call in men from all the 
district roundabout, under their commanders of tens, and if a thousand 
did not suffice to move a stone, nothing was easier than to summon two, 
or five, or ten thousand. Thus the government of to-day has continued 
many of the ancient ways, as the Church has grafted its own forms on 
the religion of the Children of the Sun. 

But more striking even than prehistoric ruins is the view of Cuzco 
from the foot of the inevitable wooden cross at the summit of Sacsa- 
huaman. So steep is the hill on this side, and so close to the town, 
that it seems almost to bulge out over it, and all the Imperial city lies 
spread out beneath, as from an aeroplane, its every plaza and patio in 
full view to its very depths, the activities of every family as plainly 
visible as if some magic wand had lifted away the concealing roofs. 
Here and there, even on a Sunday, an Indian in crude-colored garments 
and his pancake hat crawls along the fortress hill behind his oxen and 
wooden plow, with the Imperial city of his forefathers as a background. 
Beyond, the greenish valley of the Huatenay stretches away southward 
between velvety-brown, wrinkled hills, the four royal highways diverg- 

45 2 




Our party setting out for Machu Picchu across the high plains about Cuzco 




Ollantaytambo, the end of the first day*s journey, in the valley of the Urubamba. In the 
upper left-hand corner is seen the bright-yellow "school" of Inca days 



THE CITY OF THE SUN 

ing from the main plaza as principal streets and sallying forth to the 
" Four Corners of the Earth " as directly as the configurations of the 
Andes permit. But always the eye drifts back to the city below, spread 
out in every slightest detail. Under the Incas it may have been 
" bright and shining with gold and gay with color, its long and narrow 
streets, crossing each other at right angles with perfect regularity, 
adorned with beautiful palaces and temples " ; even to-day, under the 
rays of the unclouded Andean sun, it is a scene no mere words can 
bring to him who has not looked down upon it in person. The soft 
red of its aged tile roofs and the rich brown of its bulking churches 
leaves no need for golden adornment. The Sunday-morning noises 
come up distinctly, — school-boys playing in the patios of monasteries, 
fighting-cocks haughtily challenging the world to combat, a weary bell 
booming a belated summons, the half-barbarous, half-inspiring screech 
of trumpets rising as a regiment of the garrison that keeps Cuzco loyal 
to " those degenerate negroes of Lima " sets out on a march ; yet all 
blending together into a sort of pagan music that carries the imagina- 
tion bodily back to the pre-Conquest days of long ago. 



453 



CHAPTER XVII 

A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

THE traveler of to-day is seldom granted the pleasure of visit- 
ing really new territory. How much more rarely comes the 
joy of being one of the first of modern men to tread the 
streets of an entire city, unrivaled in location and unknown to his- 
tory ! Such, however, is the priyilege of those who come up to Cuzco 
in these days with the time and disregard for roughing it necessary to 
visit Machu Picchu. 

The mysterious, white-granite city of the Incas or their predecessors 
now called by that name was unknown to civilized man and the world 
until Professor Hiram Bingham of Yale visited the site in 191 1, to 
come back a year later in charge of the expedition that cleared it of 
the rampant jungle growth and the oblivion of ages. Here was un- 
covered what are perhaps the most splendid pre-Columbian ruins in 
the Western Hemisphere, most splendid because, in addition to being 
the most important — except Cuzco itself — discovered since the Con- 
quest, they have not been wrecked by treasure-hunters or confused 
with Spanish building. The account of the find had overtaken me 
in Lima, and all the four-hundred-mile tramp across Peru to the an- 
cient City of the Sun had been gladdened by the anticipation of visiting 
a spot that not only promised extraordinary interest in itself, but had 
the added attraction of being difficult of access. 

I had planned to travel to Machu Picchu alone and afoot. In Cuzco, 

however, it was my good fortune to run across Professor R of our 

Middle West, and to change in consequence my customary mode of 
transportation. We called on the prefect together. His mind wan- 
dered, as do those of all his class, to his cholita or whatever it is that 
sends the Andean official wool-gathering, even while he puzzled to ac- 
count for the joint appearance of a famous sociologist recommended 
by the President of the Republic and a tramp who had arrived on foot. 
His secretary at length delivered an impressive document informing 
whomever it might concern that we were going to " Mansupisco." 

454 



A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

When I protested, the prefect assured the professor it was often 
spelled that way. I insisted, whereupon he and the secretary sneaked 
off and found a geography, and this time got all right except the date. 
That was a week behind time, which was perhaps in keeping with the 
local color. 

Martinelli of the cinema, who volunteered to accompany us, owned 
a coast horse and a wise gray macho, leaving the prefect to obey his 
telegraphic orders only to the extent of furnishing another animal 
capable of keeping the professor's feet off the ground. This was not 
so easy as it may sound, for the professor had finally halted in his 
physical rise in the world about midway between the six and seven 
foot mark, and the horses of the Andes are rarely spoken of without 
tacking on the Spanish diminutive, ito. 

Having already spent more than a year among the people of the 
Andes, I was by no means so surprised as the professor when, upon 
descending in full road regalia to the cobbled street at six, we found 
no sign of the horse the prefect had solemnly promised to have stand- 
ing saddled at our hotel door at five. Some things come to him who 
waits — long enough — even in Peru, however, and by the time the 
third round of anecdotes was ended, there broke the street vista and 
drifted down upon us a Peruvian soldier in full accoutrements, bestrid- 
ing a sorrowful little black mule and leading as gaunt and decrepit a 
chusco as even I had ever seen among those shaggy ponies that mas- 
querade under the name of horse throughout the Andes. The soldier 
dismounted and saluted. The professor stood gazing abstractedly 
down upon the animal, no doubt drawing a mental picture of himself 
in the role of Don Quixote, with the added touch of dragging his toes 
on the ground over 150 miles of Andean trails. With a snort, and 
a speed that proved his four years in the United States had not been 
entirely misspent, Martinelli disappeared in the direction of the prefec- 
tura. Before another hour had drifted into the past he reappeared, 
followed by a second soldier leading a real horse from the corral of 
the officers of the garrison. 

" How did you manage it ? " I asked, in admiration. 

" I raised hell," said Martinelli, tightening the girth of his own 
animal. 

" What Peru most needs," mused the professor, who has the happy 
faculty of now and then giving his professional vocabulary a fur- 
lough, " is about ten thousand of you young fellows educated abroad 
to come home here and raise hell." 

455 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

Plainly the professor was already beginning to get a real mental 
grasp on South America. 

We transferred the government saddle to the real horse and by 
eight were clattering away over the cobblestones of the City of the 
Incas, the soldier on his sorrowful black mule bringing up a funereal 
rear. This was doing very well indeed. To get off on the same day 
planned, at any hour whatever, is no slight feat in the Andes. Such 
of Cuzco as had already lifted its frowsy head from the pillow gazed 
hazy-eyed out upon us as we wound and clashed our stony way up 
out of the city by that breakneck stairway down which I had de- 
scended from my trans- Peruvian journey. The morning sunlight fell 
weirdly upon the City of the Sun below when we reached the notch 
in the hills where all Indians pause before the last view of the sacred 
capital of their ancestors to murmur, with bared heads, " O Cuzco, 
Great City, I bid thee adieu ! " 

As we jogged on in the sunny October morning across the bare, col- 
orful, cool hills of Cuzco toward the lofty pampa beyond, I turned to 
ask the soldier behind : 

" Como te llamas ? " 

" Tomas," he replied, with a military salute, " Tomas Cobino, sar- 
gento de la Gendarmeria Nacional." 

" Can you be that same Tomas who was with the Americans in 
Machu Picchu?" 

" Si, senor, I attended los yanquis three months in their treasure- 
hunts." 

The means has not yet been found of convincing the people of the 
Sierra that digging about old ruins can have any motive other than that 
of seeking the traditional treasures of the Incas. 

A few miles out, the road was in the throes of " repair " by a large 
gang of Indians, under command of the alguaciles of the neighboring 
hamlets, who stood haughtily by, firmly grasping their silver-mounted 
staffs of office. They looked not at all like worldlings, but like men 
from Mars commanded by sixteenth-century pirates. At first we met 
many mule-trains, Cuzco-bound, the leaders wearing about their necks 
long jangling bells with wooden clappers. The Cuzco Indian, of the 
color of old brass, with his bare legs, scanty knee-breeches, and flat, 
black-and-red montera, sneaked noiselessly by with the air of a whipped 
cur, fawningly removing his pancake hat and murmuring an abject 
" Amripusma." The greeting sounded like Ouichua, but is merely 
what becomes of the Spanish " Ave Maria Purisima " in the mouth of 

456 



A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

the aboriginal. The professor showed great astonishment to find even 
the women raising their hats in salutation, but Martinelli and I had long 
since grown to expect it. In his democracy he touched his own hat 
and repeated " Buenos dias, sefior " to each Indian's greeting, instead 
of acknowledging it with a surly grunt or haughty silence, in the Pe- 
ruvian fashion. He would have been astonished to know how the 
startled native cudgeled his primitive brain all the way home, there 
to roll about his mud hut telling his fellows how he had met a " kara " 
so roaring drunk that he called him " sehor," as if he were a white 
man. 

Within an hour the trail swung to the right. Away over our left 
shoulders lay that splendid Plain of Anta, rich with cattle and his- 
torical memories of the Conquistadores. The distant bleat of sheep 
now and then drew our eyes to a bedraggled little Indian shepherd- 
ess, armed with a sling, and spinning incessantly, automatically, the 
crude native yarn on her cruder spindle of a quinoa-stalk run through 
a potato as whirlbob, as she edged cautiously away. These lonely 
guardians of the flocks are not infrequently pursued with impunity by 
native travelers, and are even known to resort to mechanical means to 
frustrate attack. In this treeless region the doors of the Indians' dis- 
mal mud hovels were of stiff, sun-dried, hairy cowhides. As the bare 
world rose still higher, even these miserable dwellings died out, and 
only the bleak, brown uplands of the Andes spread about us on every 
hand. 

In mid-morning we topped a great bare puna, from the chilly sum- 
mit of which the white-crested Central Cordillera stretched like some 
mighty wall across the entire horizon, the snow-peaks and glaciers 
thrusting their hoary heads through the less-white banks of clouds. 
Then a vast Andean valley, like those that had long since grown so 
familiar to me, yet were always beautiful, opened out before us, in its 
lap the town of Maras, tinted the pale red of its aged tile roofs. 
The great rolling, red-brown basin was surrounded by age-wrinkled 
mountainsides speckled with little shadowed valleys and perpendicular 
chacras, or tiny Indian farms, hung on their flanks like small paintings 
on slightly inclined walls. We halted for dinner with the gobernador, 
and for chala, as the Incas called dried cornstalks with half-matured 
ears ; and to admire the far-reaching view and the cut-stone doorways 
of mud houses sculptured with bastard Inca-Christian designs. 

We went on again over the high, brown, barren world, the wind- 
swept summit of each succeeding land-wave bringing again above the 

457 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

horizon the great snow-crested wall that each time seemed near, yet all 
the jogging day appeared not a yard nearer. At three we came sud- 
denly to a vast split in the earth, into which we began to go down 
and ever down by acute zigzags and stony cuestas that grew so steep 
we had to dismount and lead our animals. Before and below us 
spread the magnificent canon of the Urubamba, that river of many 
names which, rising near Titicaca, at length adds its bit to the giant 
Amazon. Spring plowing was in progress on the valley floor, walled 
by mountains as far as the eye could reach in either direction. Over 
this rampart the sun still peered when we reached the level of the 
river at last and, picking up the road from up the valley, jogged down 
along it. 

Stone-faced terraces of the Incas were frequent; here and there far 
up the sheer enclosing bluffs were the ruins of pre-Conquest watch- 
towers of rough stone. At times the road was itself one of these 
ancient terraces, the retaining wall of the one above rubbing our left 
elbows, a sheer drop of some eight feet to that below close on our 
right. In places the river itself was faced and narrowed by massive 
cut-stones. The exotic iron bridge, replacing to-day the former one of 
braided withes, by which we crossed to Ollantaytambo had a central 
pier of those enormous boulders which the bygone race seemed to toss 
about at will. 

We rode to the bare, mud-hutted plaza past splendid wrought-stone 
walls of what had once been palaces little inferior to those of Cuzco. 
The local " authority " bowed low over our " passport " and turned 
the gobernacion over to us for the night. This was an all but window- 
less second-story room opening on the unfurnished plaza, with a 
springy earth floor laid on poles. Into it shrinking alguaciles lugged 
our baggage and a rheumatic table and bench, without once releasing 
their staffs of office. Tomas, our soldier-servant, had found the 
bringing up of the rear a heavy task, and he and his worn and sorrow- 
ful black mule arrived with the last rays of the setting sun. Mean- 
while, the egg supply of Ollantaytambo having been greatly reduced, 
we spread our saddle-blankets and lay down with heads to the 
walls ; for the slope of the floor was such that to stretch along them 
would have been to fetch up before morning in a tangled confusion in 
the middle of the room. 

Like Limatambo, near which Chusquito had ended our joint career, 
Ollantaytambo was one of the four fortresses and rest-houses, each 
about twelve leagues out on the Inca highways that sallied forth from 

458 



A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

Cuzco to the " Four Corners of the Earth." Its ruins, among the 
most striking in South America, consist of fairly recent Inca struc- 
tures alternating with remains of unknown antiquity. Unquestioned 
history, however, has little to say of the great wrought-stone fortress 
in the best " Inca style " on the hill overlooking the town ; the several 
splendid defensive walls, on the general plan of Sacsahuaman, being 
topped off with any chips of stone at hand, as if at the sudden appear- 
ance of besiegers. This might suggest that a later race of less energy 
had taken advantage of the works of more hardy ancestors, but for 
the mystery of the " Tired Stones " of porphyry, the largest 25 by 10 
by 5 feet in dimensions, which lie abandoned all the way from the 
town to the quarry far up near the top of the mountain wall across 
the river, down the face of which they were tobogganed. 

Ollantaytambo unquestionably was once densely populated. On all 
sides it is surrounded by remarkable terraces, some still under half- 
hearted cultivation, long and flat, with barely a foot difference in each 
succeeding level, on the valley floor; narrow and high-walled on the 
swift mountainsides and for miles up a side gully to the east. The 
inhabitants of to-day, unemotional, bath-fearing, Quichua-speaking 
Indians, as in all this region, still occupy much of the old " Inca " 
town, with its shoulder-wide streets between massive stone walls that 
grow more and more careless in construction in direct ratio to their 
distance from the center. Whole blocks of these ancient houses are 
still intact, except for the roofs, a single doorway giving entrance to 
each block. Strangely enough, this was the same unbroken exterior 
wall around an interior court common to the Moor and Spaniard. Had 
it fallen to men of the Anglo-Saxon race to overthrow the empire of 
the Incas, they would have been vastly more struck by the aboriginal 
architecture than were the Conquistadores. 

Enormous cut-stones are here and there incorporated with the build- 
ings of to-day; as in Cuzco, many an adobe second-story has been 
superimposed on the walls of what must have been at least a king's 
palace. Far up the sheer bluff behind the ancient town hangs the 
" school," bright yellow in color, constructed, according to the alcalde, 
of some concrete-like substance that has not disintegrated under the 
rain and sunshine of centuries. From below it looks more like a 
five-story building than the five terraces piled one above the other on 
the inaccessible face of the mountain, which it really is. If, as is 
commonly accepted, it was a school for children of the nobles — for 
the Incas, like the priests who have inherited their power, did not 

459 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

believe in education for the common people — a daily climb to and 
descent from it eliminated any necessity for a course in physical 
training. Whether the " school " was built by another race, or 
whether those whose massive monuments cover the site below could 
not carry their blocks of stone so far aloft, is but another of those 
baffling mysteries that hover forever over the ruins of the Andes. 
About the town are several " baths " of carved stone, which may 
rather have been reservoirs for drinking water — I for one will not 
believe that a bath was ever a part of the equipment of the Andean 
Indian. As everywhere within a radius of many miles about Cuzco, 
every possible boulder, ground-stone, or rock-ledge is carved into 
seats, steps, dungeon-like grottoes, every fantastic shape a tyrannic 
mind could have conceived, a score of grotesque forms that can only 
be accounted for as the whims of some despot. The ancient Peruvian 
emperors seem to have believed, as firmly as the windjammer's 
" bo's'n " who sets his crew to picking oakum, in the relationship be- 
tween idle hands and mischief, and to have assigned the otherwise un- 
engaged the task of carving the nearest boulder. 

With the remaining half of the seventy-five miles from Cuzco to 
Mandorpampa before us, we were away betimes in the soft, early- 
summer morning, tinged with coolness from off the half-hidden snow- 
clads above, as we rode northeastward into the sunrise down the right 
bank of the Urubamba. Gradually, as the morning warmed, the blue- 
white glaciers of Piri and its neighbors shook off their night wraps of 
clouds, until they stood forth above us in all their massive grandeur. 
The valley narrowed to a canon, and that to a gorge, with repulsive, 
bare mountain walls standing precipitously more than a thousand feet 
into the sky on either hand. Here and there the rock-broiling river 
was hurried between retaining walls laboriously constructed by the by- 
gone race. Often these alone held us up, as the precipice shouldered us 
to the sheer edge of the stream ; sometimes, indeed, the road was 
hewn out of the perpendicular mountainside and carried tremulously 
across from one solid foothold to another on patched-up props of 
stone. Straight above us on virtually unassailable crags were the ruins 
of walls, and perhaps small forts, the holders of which might have 
showered down boulders squarely upon us — had they not centuries 
since been laid away in their bottle-shaped graves, hugging their osse- 
ous knees. On the inaccessible left bank were scores of ancient ter- 
races. For miles every available inch of the mountainside had once 
been prepared for cultivation. Small, indeed, must have been the 

460 



aP.W? 



3 tr 



5 3 




A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

laborer's wage, a daily handful of beans and corn, in this once densely 
populated canon, where the struggle for existence forced the con- 
struction of an eight-foot wall of stone to uphold a four-foot shelf of 
cultivation. 

Hourly it grew more perfect summer, and ever more delightful 
views and magnificent vistas broke unexpectedly upon us, contrast- 
ing strangely with the bleak, wind-swept puna of the day before. The 
old trail from Cuzoo to the tropical montafia climbed sulkily away up 
a side quebrada toward the dreary uplands. This new road to Santa 
Ana had only recently made accessible for the first time in modern 
days this marvelous canon of the Urubamba. It was nowhere steep. 
We went down by frequent little stony descents, with no corresponding 
rises, half-aware of now and then standing in our stirrups as our 
animals dropped from under us, the conscious self gazing at the en- 
thralling scene below and above. Frequent pack-trains passed us, 
bound upward out of the hot-lands with cargoes of fiery native aguar- 
diente, in leather skins inside cloth-wrapped wooden frames, or long 
cylindrical packages of coca-leaves such as the drivers were chewing. 
Often the meetings were at points where only extreme vigilance saved 
us from being pushed over the precipice ; for, though our right of way 
gave us>the mountainside, the pack-animals, shy of the roaring stream 
below, sought to crowd in between us and the wall, in spite of the 
threatening cries and whistling of their arrieros. 

At eleven we stopped for " breakfast." By the time we were in the 
saddle again the vegetation began to grow frankly tropical. The ap- 
proach to the vast Amazonian lowlands was heralded by trees, then 
by whole forests climbing the lower flanks of the hills that cut in 
alternately from either side ; then they began clothing the lower ridges 
and the flanks of the mountains themselves, in delightful contrast to the 
dreary treelessness of the upper heights. The first full-grown trees of 
the montafia, crowding in among the hardy shrubs of the lower high- 
lands, began to stand forth against the irregular patches of sky ahead. 
Jungle brush and undergrowth sprang up about us. Moss and trop- 
ical herbage took to draping the moist rocks and boulders, until even 
the perpendicular face of the mountain clothed itself in lush-green 
vegetation. Ferns, the first I had seen in months, appeared, and 
quickly grew to their gigantic tropical forms. Orchids were plentiful, 
and other flowers of brilliant colors. The government telegraph wire 
that had followed us across the bleak, wind-swept puna the day before, 
on poles shriveled with the cold, began to jump gaily from parasite- 

461 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

laden tree to tree. Brooks of sparkling clear water came leaping 
down from the unseen glaciers and frozen heights above, to the joy 
of both man and beast. A condor, volplaning on motionless wings high 
above the mountain wall, looked like a sparrow mingled with the white 
clouds that flecked the summer sky. A soft wind caressed us, and 
upon us fell that lazy, contented mood that always follows a descent 
from the cold, nerve-straining paramo. 

As we descended still deeper into the fastnesses of the Andes, the 
solid granite precipices, rising sheer thousands of feet from the foam- 
ing rapids to the clouds, remained at the same height ; but the valley of 
the river continued to descend, and gave us the curious effect of seem- 
ing to see the mountains that shut us in rise ever higher into the sky. 
The canon of the Urubamba had shrunk to a resounding gorge of 
sharp V-shape, with virtually no room left for cultivation, so that even 
the hardy andenes of the ancients were crowded out of existence, and 
only the imperious river forced its way through the mountains, per- 
mitting the narrow road to follow on the precarious footholds blasted 
for it along one of the towering granite walls. We began to meet 
yellow, fever-eyed walking skeletons, straggling languidly up from the 
tropical valleys. These increased until all the few travelers were 
gaunt and hollow-eyed, and of a lifeless cast of countenance. Now a 
humid jungle hemmed us in; impenetrable tropical forest covered all 
the tumbled mountain world about us, the further ranges blue-black 
with distance, an unbroken wilderness in which might lie buried a 
score of forgotten cities. Trees assumed those fantastic shapes that 
startle or mock the tropical traveler. Lianas, those great climbing 
vines over which the northern school-boy dreams before his open 
geography while the snow swirls about the shivering window, swung 
languidly from these giants of the jungle. The rampant vegetation 
clutched playfully at us along the way ; now and again a branch reached 
forth and whipped us in our sweated faces. The drowsy chorus of the 
jungles sounded about us ; the tropical joy of life took possession even 
of the professor, rousing him to song, so that the canon resounded 
with discordant, rumbling Middle-Western noises. 

Toward four the beautiful jagged peak of Huayna Picchu came into 
sight down the winding gorge, puffs of white clouds hovering about 
it; and we knew we were approaching our goal. But things moved 
with ever more tropical languor. In places the road became a 
stony stairway down which we must pick our way step by step; in 
others it was pieced together with slivers of rock to keep it from fall- 

462 



A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

ing sheer into the angry stream below. The impending crags squeezed 
the trail to the extreme edge, so that an unwary horseman, gazing at 
the riches of nature about him, was not infrequently rapped on the head 
by jagged points of rock left by the dynamite of the trail-builders. 
Tropical birds of startling plumage flitted in and out of the impene- 
trable undergrowth; the pungent, death-suggesting, yet enticing scent 
of the tropics filled our nostrils. The sun abandoned us early, and left 
us with a sense of being down in some great well dreamily wondering 
whether we should ever again reach the broad, open world above. 

Dusk was falling when the road wandered out upon a bit of flat 
meadow, squeezed between the mountain wall and the now calmer river, 
facing the breakneck slopes of Huayna Picchu. This was Mandor- 
pampa. A grass-thatched hut on poles served as tambo. As we hung 
our alforjas over the unhewn beams, an unattractive half-breed, past 
middle age and scented with fire-water, appeared from the adjoining 
hut he occupied with a flock of Quichua-speaking women and children. 
It was he who had first guided los yanqnis to the then jungle-hidden 
Machu Picchu. He had long known of the ruins, as had other na- 
tives, but had never considered them extensive or important. In- 
deed, he seemed still to have a distinctly low opinion of them as 
" things of, the Gentiles," not to be compared with the Cathedral of 
Cuzco, with its tin saints and tinseled Virgins. He promised to climb 
to the site with us in the morning, however, for a consideration, and 
I fell to preparing supper over my miniature cooking-range. 

After it, we sat for a time in the heavy, humming, tropical night, 
listening to the chirrido of jungle crickets and striving by anecdote and 
song to keep up the professor's spirits, drooping under the dread of 
snakes and vipers and the thousand subtle dangers of the tropics. 
For the night we arranged that Martinelli should share with the fam- 
ily chickens the pole couch of the Indian's " guest-room," knowing 
that, as a Peruvian, he preferred to sleep in as airless a spot as possi- 
ble, while the professor and I prepared to hoist ourselves up into the 
garret of small poles under the low thatched roof of the tambo. It 
was like stowing a piano on an upper bookshelf, but we got a bit of 
our " beds " bunched under us at last, and when the poles had ceased 
to sag and creak, I fell asleep. 

The humid darkness was showing signs of fading when I woke the 
professor from a night during which, by his own testimony, he had 
not slept a wink. The cause of his insomnia was not lack of comfort, 
for the professor is an experienced man of the woods, but a great 

463 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

mental anguish. An insect had stung him on a knuckle. Now the 
professor had just come from investigating that dread disease of the 
Andes knows as uta, from the Quichua word for rot, which, beginning 
in just such an insect bite, eats away the victim's flesh until he is 
hurried at breakneck speed into the grave. His was too fixed a place 
in the life of our Middle West to afford to be rotted away here in 
the Peruvian jungle by a mere insect. Naturally he wanted our ear- 
nest examination and experienced opinion whether we should, after 
all, climb to Machu Picchu or hurry back to Cuzco to call a conference 
of the medical wiseacres. I examined the bite solicitously. There 
was no doubt that it was merely the preliminary nibble of the myriad 
insects that would have fallen upon us in earnest, and tattooed us with 
the strange patterns I had already often worn, had we descended an- 
other five thousand feet into the real tropics. But one cannot put 
such things cruelly and baldly to a companion weighed down by the 
intangible dread of the subtle, pest-infested hot-lands, from which no 
man is free upon his first descent into them. Between us we con- 
vinced the professor that he would in all probability outlive the day, 
and by fog-bound six we were off. 

The lover of ardent waters had concluded that he could not possibly 
get his various activities in shape to accompany us before eight, and 
we decided to hobble along without his historical assistance. We paid 
him two soles to keep the animals well fed and, lest the matter slip 
his mind, left Tomas with him as a perpetual reminder. This left us 
well burdened with our " beds " and the supplies necessary to pass 
the night, for I would not hear of paying the forgotten city only a 
flying visit. Being the only one in Andean training, I volunteered to 
carry the surplus and, bowed under a bulky sixty-five pounds held 
by a llama-hair rope across my chest, like any Indian cargador, I led 
the way back along the road, planning to boast myself forever after 
the equal of any aboriginal burden-bearer of the Andes. Barely 
had I reconciled myself to the perpendicular climb in store for us 
under such a load, however, when we came upon a gang of Indians 
chopping the boulder-imbedded roadway higher back under the edge 
of the cliff for flood-time. The foreman offered us carriers. None 
of them were large; beside the professor the impassive fellows ap- 
proached dwarfishness, and I uttered a protest when Martinelli waved 
a thumb at by no means the largest. But my fancied equality to the 
human freight-trains of the Andes oozed away as suddenly as the 
rotundity of a pricked wine-skin. When, the Indian had swung upon 

464 




"As we rode eastward into the sunrise down the gorge of the Urubamba, glacier-clad Piri 
above threw off its night wraps of clouds " 




The semicircular tower and some of the finest stone-cutting and fitting of Machu Picchu. 

The vegetation had already begun to grow up again but a few months 

after the site had been cleared 



A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

his back the burden I had been staggering under on a level roadway, 
Martinelli nonchalantly tossed his twenty-five pounds on top of it. A 
bit further on that unfeeling savage paused at one of the pole-and-leaf 
shelters of the workmen under the edge of the impending cliff and 
added a pair of blankets, a coca-bag, and several other personal odds 
and ends, then waltzed away as lightly as a prairie chicken under its 
tail-feathers — faster than we cared to follow. 

Perhaps two miles back, a hidden path plunged swiftly down through 
the wet, clinging jungle to the sapling bridge that hung precariously 
from rock to boulder across the river. Beyond the snarling stream, 
which snatched impotently at us as we passed, sagging, a perpendicular 
jungled mountainside, apparently impenetrable, stared impassively 
down upon us. But when we had clambered and tripped some distance 
over the rocks and jagged boulders at the edge of the raging torrent, 
a hole in the undergrowth, like the lair of some wild animal, proved to 
be the beginning of a trail, now overgrown almost to nothing. 

The first mile up was through densest wet jungle. We climbed 
clutching at the vegetation as at the hair of some giant head we were 
striving to surmount. The average slope was perhaps sixty-five de- 
grees, though there were places virtually perpendicular where to lose 
an Andean* level-headedness would have been to pitch many yards 
down toward the now hoarse river below. According to local repute, 
this section was notorious for its venomous snakes, particularly a little 
ten-inch vibora whose bite is certain death unless the victim instantly 
adopts the heroic measures of the Indians and carves out a Shylock- 
ian chunk of flesh, cauterize the wound with a hot iron, and retire a 
half-year to recuperate. But as with all tales of robbers, dangers, and 
sudden death on the road ahead, that behind me trailed out harmless 
and unexciting. 

Gradually the heavy jungle gave way to a lighter, stunted growth 
that had once been burned over and on which the sun blazed down 
mercilessly. Up the all but sheer face of this the trail sweated in 
sharp zigzags. Rumifiaui, as we had dubbed our stony-eyed carrier, 
kept steadily above us, and though he panted a bit, it was the least 
burdened of us who called now and then for a breathing-spell. Dry- 
tongued with thirst, we came at last to an almost level shelf of the 
mountain, with a patch of shade. In it grew a " Spanish tomato " 
shaped like a huge strawberry, of a double acidity that throttled our 
thirst for the moment. Somewhat higher we found ourselves mount- 
ing ancient agricultural terraces. These were walls of rough stone, 

465 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

head high, that sustained level spaces of like width. Far from being 
under cultivation, the rich, black soil of these artificial mountain 
shelves nourished an all but impassable tangle of new jungle growth; 
and the trunks of great trees that had been felled and charred over 
cut us off in many directions. By working our way laboriously back 
and forth, and gradually mounting several terraces, now by a canted 
tree-trunk, now by the four projecting stones set stair-like in the 
faces of the walls, by which the prehistoric husbandmen mounted 
and descended, we found a terrace along which we could tear our way, 
and came out at last, nearly two hours above the river, on the sheer 
edge of things. Machu Picchu lay before us. 

My first impression was tinged with disappointment. Aside from 
the universal experience of finding a long-heralded scene striking in 
inverse ratio to the length of time the imagination has fed upon it, 
my mental picture of a city seemed to call for skyscrapers crowded 
together over a vast area that could be bound closely together 
only by a rapid-transit system. Measured by these subconscious 
standards, the town the Incas or their predecessors had left here 
in the beautiful fastnesses of the Urubamba was small. But at 
least it had been our good fortune to catch the first sight of it from 
a splendid point of vantage. Well below us, and across a gully so 
deep as to be almost a valley, the abandoned city lay spread out under 
the gorgeous Andean sunshine in all its white-granite brilliancy; and 
if all the town could not be included in a view from this point, or from 
any other, that view included all the finer buildings, and left out chiefly 
the extensive andenes and the third-class houses of those who lived 
on and worked them. Though roofless, it was otherwise a complete 
city, in so fine a state of preservation that the beholder felt like one 
of the old Spanish Conquistadores in those enviable years when there 
were still new worlds to discover. 

On a gigantic scale, its site was that of an ancient feudal castle. 
A mountain ridge defended by nature in one of her most solitary 
moods, and including within its confines the steeple-pointed peak of 
Huayna Picchu, fell away on every side by tremendous precipices into 
the fearful void of the Urubamba, a sheer unbroken two thousand feet 
to the thread-like river that makes a three fourths circle around it; 
while beyond, pregnant with mystery of impassable jungle and the 
story of a bygone race, lay a wonderful wilderness of Andean ranges, 
shaggy with dense forest, pitched and tumbled and fading away in 
the blue-black of unfathomable distance. Yet how strange that an 

466 



A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

entire city, a mere two days' ride from Cuzco, should thus have re- 
mained for centuries unknown! Only he who knows the Latin- 
American will comprehend how Machu Picchu could be so seldom 
visited even now, after los yanquis have uncovered it; though the 
cuzquefios who passively wait for foreigners to come and do what they 
themselves should long since have done blandly assume credit for the 
newly discovered city, as if they had some part in it because the blood 
of its builders runs in their veins. Yet to the world at large its exist- 
ence was never suspected. Squier, noted for his accuracy, says self- 
confidently : " Ollantaytambo was the frontier town and fortress of 
the Incas in the valley of the Ucayali, as it is to-day of their con- 
querors. There were outlying works some leagues lower down at 
Havaspampa, but the bulwark of the Empire against the savage Antis 
in this direction was Ollantaytambo." Small wonder he heard noth- 
ing of a place not a whisper of which has crept into all the writings 
of Peru since Pizarro's secretary first took to setting down the prowess 
of his commander. 

Machu Picchu was indeed a city of refuge. There is no need of 
Incaic lore and the furrowed brow of the archeologist to be certain 
of that. Only men scared beyond the functioning of goose-flesh would 
have scurried away into this most inaccessible nook of the Andes and 
scrambled up these appalling cliffs to escape their pursuers ; only men 
to whom labor was nothing as compared with the fear of bodily vio- 
lence would have toiled a century fitting together these gigantic boul- 
ders, rather than sally forth and take their chances against the slings 
or poisoned arrows of their enemies. The slinking, hare-hearted 
Cuzco Indian of to-day may easily be their lineal descendant. 

Effectively defended by nature though they were, these champions of 
precaution left no loopholes. Across the gully between where we sat 
and the lost city they had thrown two massive stone walls from sheer 
precipice to sheerer. Outside this were most of the agricultural ter- 
races, for within the city proper was scant space for cultivation, and 
in case of attack the peasants no doubt abandoned their fields and 
raced to town. Between these walls lay a dry moat, deep and wide, 
while at the city gate the fortress was constructed on the " salient " 
system of Sacsahuaman, so that while a besieger was gently knocking 
for admittance some member of the goose-flesh clan could stroll out 
on the wall above and drop a boulder on his astonished head. Nor 
was that all. In every least crevice or foothold across which the 
champion trapeze performer or tight-rope artist of the besieging tribes 

467 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

could by any stretch of the trembling imagination have squirmed his 
way, the defenders built little patches of rock-wall, in places he only 
will believe who has climbed to see ; and on the tiptop of the neighbor- 
ing heights, on Machu Picchu mountain, on the steeple-point of Huayna 
Picchu, in every crow's-nest the most athletic Indian could hope to 
reach, were stone watch-towers, sometimes invisible, from which cer- 
tainly the sentinels had some telegraphic means of passing word down 
to the cautious city. There were no adventurers among the builders 
of Machu Picchu. They took no chances. 

When we had drunk in this comprehensive view of the forgotten 
city, we descended by projecting terrace stones and jungled zigzags 
and finally by a great stone stairway to the dry moat, then by a graded 
approach to the city gate, always tearing our way through thick under- 
growth. For though " los chapetes " had cleared away the dense 
tropical forest that had hidden the city from civilized man since his- 
torical time began, the rampant vegetation was striving quickly to con- 
ceal it again, as if jealous of its beauty or guardian of its secret. 
Being far more determined in its efforts than the apathetic Peruvians, 
it bade fair to succeed. Already the caiia brava waved impudently 
head-high everywhere, and what might grow to such trees as had been 
felled in hundreds were already sprouting forth again here and there 
from between the interstices of the splendid walls. A deserving- 
politician caretaker had been appointed by the government, but he 
was caring for both Machu Picchu and Ollantaytambo by living in 
Cuzco on his salary. 

We sent Rumiiiaui ahead to stack our junk under the weather- 
blackened thatch roof supported by four slender legs, down in a central 
space that might have been a parade-ground or a garden to fall back 
upon in time of siege. There we hastened to disentangle the canvas 
bucket and bade him " Unuta apamuy." But it was more easily 
ordered than brought. The cut-stone basins to which small acequias 
had once carried water down off the shoulders of the range behind 
had gone stone-dry, and as we lay choking in the welcome shade, 
surviving only on the anticipation of the cooling draughts soon to 
come, the Indian came wandering back with that apathetic expression- 
lessness of his race — the bucket empty. Martinelli rose up, cursing 
in three tongues, to lead him, and soon returned to say that a well- 
filled bucket was following close behind. But Martinelli was a 
Peruvian, given like all his race to counting his chickens before the 
eggs are laid. After fighting his way through the jungle to the edge 

468 



A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

of the hollow " where the spring really is," he had neglected to de- 
scend ten yards further through the bushes to find whether the spring 
really was. So that a few yards behind his resuscitating announce- 
ment came trailing Rumifiaui, more stony-eyed than ever, still carry- 
ing a collapsed bucket. 

Audible expression of our inmost sentiments would have been the 
opposite of thirst-quenching, and as each day consists of a limited 
number of hours, even in the waterless tropics, I slung my kodak over 
a shoulder and set out to see as much as possible before preservation 
of life might force a hurried descent to the river. The fancied dis- 
appointment of the first view had worn completely away. As the 
mind adapted itself to pre-Columbian standards, the abandoned city 
assumed its true aspect, that of a delicate work of art of intensive 
construction. Here in this eagle's nest of the Andes, virtually cut 
off from the rest of the world, had lived an artistic and adaptable 
people with a capacity for concentration of effort, for sustained en- 
deavor, and a high grade of efficiency now lost among the Peruvians. 
Virtually all the stone work of the better part of the city was of 
the very best " Inca style " in plan, cut, and fit. Nothing I had seen 
in all the length of the Andes, from Cafiar in the far north, could 
surpass these walls, rivaled only by those of Cuzco ; and even those of 
the City of *the Sun cannot match the charming uniform color of this 
white-gray granite, approaching in beauty to pure marble. Whereas 
Sacsahuaman and Ollantaytambo seemed massive, cyclopean, this new 
city of old gives the effect of a delicate gem in a peerless setting — 
though the man of to-day ordered to tote the smallest block in the 
average wall would not exactly refer to it as delicate. 

Like the remains of Cuzco, the ruins are exclusively confined to walls. 
The Inca civilization seems to have been of that utilitarian turn of 
mind that gives its attention chiefly to the practical, with the result 
that to-day there is not a statue in the length and breadth of Peruvian 
ruins ; and the grass-thatched roofs beyond which these unrivaled stone- 
cutters did not advance may have fallen in centuries before Pizarro 
first herded his pigs among the foothills of Estremadura. But as 
walls they are unsurpassed, fitted with so tireless a nicety that, even 
without mortar, they stand to-day, except where the roots of trees 
have crowded in between them, striking illustrations of that time- 
worn phrase of all Peruvian chroniclers from Garsilaso to Squier, 
" so that a knife-blade cannot be inserted between them." Marble- 
white walls there were so splendidly symmetrical that time after time 

469 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the enraptured eye stole along them as over a beloved form. As 
with all Inca architecture, everything, — walls, doors, niches — de- 
creased in size toward the top, at about the slope of the surrounding 
precipices, carrying the mind back to Karnak and the ruins of the 
Nile. Every possible ground-boulder or rock-ledge and mountain- 
platform was made full use of, and the eye at times hardly detects 
where the building of nature leaves off and the planning of man begins. 
Hidden away from the iconoclastic, gold-thirsting Spaniards, and so 
far distant from the dwellings of his effete descendants that trans- 
portation of its blocks for their own botching is impossible, Machu 
Picchu has escaped the common fate of the other pre-Columbian ruins 
of the Andes and remains a city intact, like Pompeii, as genuine as 
when its inhabitants abandoned it, carrying off perhaps their house- 
hold gods and the revered remains of their ancestors. But for the 
missing roof, scores of buildings are as well preserved as on the day 
their dwellers departed. Rough-stone, windowed gables — though 
both Humboldt and Prescott deny the existence of gables or windows 
in ancient Peru — stand everywhere peaked above the general level, 
sometimes still bearing the stump of a great tree the roots of which 
had curled and twined in among the stones wherever a handful of 
soil was to be found to feed upon. The ruins seemed to sprout flowers 
and trees. Giants of the forest grew wherever there was a suggestion 
of foothold; with a Jewish persistency they had crowded in between 
apparently inseparable stone blocks ; great trees had sprung up and 
grown to man's estate in unbelievable places, on the very peaks of frail 
stone gables, even out from between the still tight-fitted granite boul- 
ders. The task of " los yanquis " had been no sinecure. They had 
felled an entire tropical forest, with giant trees a century old, the 
charred trunks of a few of which lay as they had fallen, like glutton- 
ous bandits overtaken at their stolen feast, convenient stairways now 
from one terrace to another. But much care had been necessary. 
Many a stump must be left where it stood, for even to attempt its 
removal would frequently have brought down half the structure it 
grew in. Besides clearing it of the concealing vegetation, the Ameri- 
cans had dug away in places several feet of soil and had presented at 
last the entire city, with its alignment of streets, its " baths," temples, 
palaces, and blocks of dwellings. The finest ruins of the Western 
Hemisphere, the mystery of this city of the unpeopled wilderness 
trebles its fascination. How could such a place have completely eluded 
the foraging Spaniards? How could long centuries have passed dur- 

470 



A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

ing which Ollantaytambo was accepted as the last monument of im- 
portance in the valley of the Urubamba ? How — 

But just then a cry of " Cancha unu ! " from Martinelli, who affected 
Quichua since he found I had some knowledge of it, brought me tear- 
ing back through the undergrowth to the roof on legs. Back along 
one of the terraces a trickling supply of water had been found, and now 
we might take time to view the ruins more leisurely. We concocted 
a lunch and sent Stony-Eye to carry our possessions to a " sacred 
cave " among the palaces. 

The town centers about the main plaza, with its splendid wrought- 
stone temple, backed by the priest's dwelling with the sacred hill piled 
up behind it. Here, too, is the temple of the three windows, so un- 
usual a feature of prehistoric Peruvian architecture that the chief of 
the excavators connects it with the tradition of the three brothers 
who came out of as many windows to found the Empire of the 
Incas. " Al principio del mundo," as Garsilaso puts it, — " In the be- 
ginning of the world, say the Indians who live to the east and north 
of the city of Cuzco, three brothers sallied forth through some win- 
dows in some rocks, which they called royal windows." Certainly, if 
this is the original Tampu Tocco from which came the founders of 
the Empire, they improved little in their building during the long 
years between Machu Picchu and the construction of Cuzco. Its 
sponsor considers the city a thousand years old. Yet though the 
virile simplicity of its construction is untouched by the beginning 
of that ornateness that marks decadence in all civilizations, there is 
something of delicacy and artistic splendor, even amid a curious mix- 
ture of the crude and primitive, that does not seem to bespeak an 
older and less-developed people than the builders of Cuzco. 

The long, solid walls are broken, as in most Inca structures, by 
niches large and small, mere shallow closets without doors, with cylin- 
drical projecting stones alternating between them. These have been 
fancied, among other things, to have been wardrobes and hooks for 
clothing, but the habit of their descendants suggest that the builders 
were content to hang their garments on the floor. Though larger than 
the average Andean dwelling of to-day, houses of more than one room 
are rare. The ancient Peruvians were evidently as indifferent to lack 
of privacy as their modern successors. Along the walls are stone 
couches as comfortable as those of sun-baked mud which the weary 
traveler is fortunate to find in the better-class houses of the interior 
to this day. They probably had as little furniture as their descendants, 

471 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

and the host of long ago no doubt greeted his guest with that self- 
same "Tome asiento " (Be seated) and a wave of the hand toward 
a six-inch block of wood or a sharp corner of stone. They lived 
apparently more thickly than in any modern tenement-house, and the 
problem of increase of population must have been acute. Was it 
this internal pressure that forced them finally to abandon their eagle's- 
nest? Every square foot of ground was utilized, the rooms densely 
crowded together, with even subterranean dwellings, and long rows 
of rough-stone houses stand steeply one above the other on the swift 
precipices of the city. 

For all its ups and downs — and it was next to impossible to go 
somewhere else in Machu Picchu without climbing or descending — 
intercommunication was amply provided. Scores of stairways of all 
lengths and sizes, often laboriously cut out of a single ground-boulder, 
lead everywhere. Mrs. Tocco had no difficulty in dropping in on 
Mrs. Huasi simply because she lived in another clan-group or up 
over her head. Tunnels, too, were common to this ingenious race of 
stone-cutters, and fat men must have been as rare as among the In- 
dians of to-day, or distinctly limited in their movements. No nation 
under blockade ever made more intensive use of its agricultural pos- 
sibilities. Within a radius of several miles not a possible foot of 
ground escaped cultivation. The soil, carried perhaps from a great 
distance, was richly fertile, and to these men of a bygone race the 
building of a massive stone wall to support half its size in arable 
ground was all in the day's work. The terraces on the north side of 
the mountain, half agricultural, half defensive, drop swiftly away as 
long as there is a suggestion of foothold, and those on the west of the 
sacred plaza and below the intihuatana, or sun-dial, go down so ver- 
tiginously hand over hand that there could have been no dizzy heads 
among the husbandmen of long ago. It was easy for the peasant of 
those days to do away with an enemy; he had only to reach down 
from his own field and push his rival off his three-foot farm into 
bottomless oblivion. 

I pushed on toward the outskirts. The social inequalities of to-day 
were as native to the civilization of this lost race. As one left the 
center, the houses grew less and less like the cut-stone palaces ; on the 
edges of the town hung mere cobblestone hovels, little better than the 
miserable dens of the modern Indian. All about them now was ram- 
pant cane jungle. On the slopes, from the interstices between the 
rocks, even on the thatched roof of last year's shelter of the workmen, 

472 



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A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

grew big yellow calabashes, like gypsy pumpkins. Then there was 
wild corn and self-sown potatoes, bushes of ripe aji, the beloved 
peppers of the Incas, in deep reds and greens. These were no doubt 
the chief products of olden times, constantly threatened with suffoca- 
tion by the belligerent tropical vegetation. Monarch of all he sur- 
veyed — and it was much — the ruler of this aery probably lived 
chiefly on corn and frozen potatoes, ground in such carved stone mor- 
tars as are still to be found here; and he could not have been over- 
whelmingly troubled with a longing for* the fleshpots or for other ex- 
citement than that his enemies gave him. For he does not seem to 
have often visited other towns, and even " los yanquis " found no 
ruins of theater or billiard-hall. 

The Incas, using the word broadly, showed an extraordinary liking 
for building where they had an unbroken outlook over all the sur- 
rounding world. Lovers of nature, perhaps, though the apparently 
complete indifference of their descendants to its charms and moods 
makes this debatable, they were, above all, practical fellows, moved 
less by esthetic reasons than by an overwhelming dislike of being 
awakened from an afternoon siesta by a well-aimed boulder. Yet 
had their only quest been unrivaled situations, that of Machu Picchu 
could scarcely have been improved upon. Mere words or pictures 
give faint idea of the unique charm of the place. Men not merely 
of iron will and endless patience, they must also have had a fixed 
and unchanging policy for generations, for with such tools as they 
possessed it is inconceivable that they could have built Machu Picchu 
in less than a century. Not even their ambitionless descendants of 
to-day have less of the wanderlust than they; and what a conviction 
of the perpetual endurance of the status quo was theirs, to take such 
infinite pains in their building that they need not even be repaired for 
centuries. Were they driven out by the fierce Aymaras from the 
south, or by the dreaded " huari-ni," the " breechless " tribes from the 
hot-lands below, which the meek Indian of the highlands fears to 
this day; were they suddenly wiped out by an epidemic; or did they 
gather strength and courage after centuries of hiding in this lofty 
nest and sally forth with the avowed intention of conquering the 
world, perhaps to be destroyed, and the secret of their city with them ? 
Every traveler knows how isolated groups of men gradually come to 
fancy themselves superior to all the rest of the universe. Whatever 
the cause of the migration, it must have taken stern renunciation to 
leave behind so much of the work of themselves and their ancestors. 

473 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

I was aroused from my musings by a crashing in the jungle, and 
the professor hailed me with, " Wait ! I want your advice ! " It was 
that awful bite on the knuckle again. By this time it had grown to 
nearly the size of the second letter of this word, was a pale red in 
color, and about it was a swelling that could plainly be seen under 
a microscope, or without one by a man with good eyes and a badly 
worried imagination. 

" Now of course this might not turn out to be uta," said the victim, 
in an agitated voice, " but if it should, twenty-four hours delay might 
make all the difference in the world, and I wonder if it wouldn't be 
prudent, at least, to go down now and get started back to Cuzco." 

I examined the alarming symptom with care. There was no doubt 
that it was the dreaded " rot " — bally rot, in fact. As to the swelling, 
had not I myself more than once been so swollen by tropical insects 
that my best friends would not have recognized me in a bar-room? 
Moreover, I was not to be cheated out of the night I had promised 
myself in the abandoned city, and from words of sympathy and re- 
assurance, I led the conversation deftly and gently back through the 
mention of the professor's large life-insurance policy, to the dangers 
of life here in the days of the Incas, who had not even those post-mor- 
tem sops to make existence bearable, until the terror of the tropics, 
inherent in all men of the temperate zone, was buried beneath the 
fascinating mystery of the fathomless past. 

The earth offers few such views as that from the intihuatana, the 
" place where the sun was tied," at the top of the town. There the 
great topping boulder has been carved into an upright shaft of stone, 
of symbolic sacredness no doubt in those bygone days when the 
people of Peru made the error of worshipping the sun instead of 
bowing down before wooden images, though it looks as much like a 
beheading-block as a sun-dial. The scene is best enjoyed alone. The 
intrusion of modern man seems to break the spell, and the imagina- 
tion halts lamely in its striving to build up the past. Literally at my 
feet the world dropped away sheer to the Urubamba, like a copper 
thread all but encircling the entire city with what is virtually one 
precipice. The altitude of Machu Picchu is put at 8500 feet and 
that of the river at 2000 less, yet it is surprising how distinctly the roar 
of the stream comes up to the very top of the invulnerable city. Utterly 
unpeopled, the visible world is one tumbled mass of gigantic forest- 
clad mountains rolling away to inaccessible distance-blue ranges, rising 
afar off to snow-capped crests mingled with the sky. Here are not the 

474 



A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

f 

haggard and sterile Andes of elsewhere, but softened, undulating forms, 
so densely wooded that nowhere is a spot of earth visible. Swing 
round the circle, and on the other side the gaze falls as precipitously 
into the Urubamba. There three great ranges rise one behind another, 
fading from blue to the purple of vast distances, until the icy wall 
of the Central Cordillera shuts off all the world beyond. In another 
direction the rolling purple ranges die enticingly away one beyond 
the other into the great montana and the hot-lands of the Amazon, 
while masses of pure white clouds come floating majestically up out 
of Brazil beyond. One regrets having to return as he came, always 
a misfortune, and the gaze falls again to the hoarse thread of river 
below, watching it wind away into the mystery of the unknown, to 
break through the central range beyond where the eye loses it, and so 
on away, away. But the chief hardship of travel is renunciation. 

Here, in what is to-day the home only of the condor, one may muse, 
but muse in vain, on the history of Machu Picchu. A thousand years 
old; and a thousand years hence it will still be here! Why is man 
of such perishable stuff that mere rocks and stones may laugh at the 
brevity of his existence? If only one could call back the ancient 
inhabitants to tell their story ! Did they build so long before the Con- 
quest that the city was already overgrown and forgotten when the 
bearded centaurs first appeared to startle and undo their descendants? 
Or was this some secret holy spot the Indians concealed by silence 
even from the garrulous descendant of Huayna Ccapac? Were its 
existence known to them, why did not Tupac Amaru and his followers 
set up a defence here against the Spaniards? For even in those days 
the place would have been invulnerable against anything but treachery 
from within. 

However baffling its story, it is not difficult for one who has wan- 
dered along the Andes to build up a picture of the living city of the 
past as he sits here in the declining day, lulled yet excited by the 
ceaseless music of the Urubamba far below, mysterious, Indian-like 
in its impassiveness, as if it knew, but were sworn forever to guard, 
the secret it has girdled with its impregnable precipices for unknown 
centuries. Before the inner eye the many stone stairways take on life. 
Up and down them move unhurriedly, yet actively, thick-set men and 
women with broad, copper-tinted faces, noiseless in their bare feet, 
their garments a constant interweaving of many bright colors. The 
hundreds of peaked gables take on gothic-steep roofs of thatch, sym- 
metrical, carefully made, perhaps with decorated ceilings within, at 

475 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

least in the temples and palaces. Llamas step silently through the 
narrow streets, gazing' with haughty dreaminess about them. From 
all the crowded city rises the hum of busy, bucolic life, yet not noisily, 
for the general tone is peaceful industry and a phlegmatic preoccupa- 
tion. Now and again the hollow boom of a wooden gong rises and 
dies away in one of the sacred temples. As the shadows lengthen, 
bare-legged workmen, a cheek swollen with a cud of coca, mount up 
the breakneck terraces below, waving with Indian corn or purple with 
potato-blossoms, pass silently along the brow of the intihuatana hill, 
and hurry unhurriedly on to their cobble-stone huts in the crowded 
outskirts. A greater hush than before falls on all the scene, except 
for the never- varying voice of the Urubamba, as the Inca, majestic 
of mien, the royal llauta about his forehead, attended a certain dis- 
tance by respectful nobles bearing the symbolic burden on their shoul- 
ders, mounts to the sacred rock. There, alone, or attended at respect- 
ful aloofness only by the high-priests of the little temple behind, he 
watches the god of the Peruvians of old sink swiftly, as it was sinking 
now, behind the snow range that stands out cold and clear to the 
west, and sees the labyrinth of shaggy, wooded ranges beyond the 
bottomless void below melt and merge into one common, fading-purple 
whole. Off in a corner of the city, on the brow of the headlong 
precipice, comes faintly to the imperial ears the sound of stone striking 
stone, where the miscreant sentenced that day to carve a new seat in 
an over-carved boulder before the coming of the new moon plies his 
task. With full darkness even this ceases. The faint smoke-columns 
of the supper-fires die away, and before the night is an hour old 
the entire city is sunk in slumber, save only the watchmen in their 
towers and aeries behind and above, and along the city wall in the 
hollow beneath. From these come faint glows to punctuate the dark- 
ness of the Andean night, then nothing, and from a living city Machu 
Picchu returns to what it is, an utterly unpeopled mountain-peak cut 
off from all the known world, into which have intruded three hob- 
nailed beings of noisy modern days, and their stony-eyed serving-man 
briefly loaned from that world of long ago. 

Martinelli was inclined to sleep in the sacred cave under the circu- 
lar tower. To this the professor objected, as too " snaky," and they 
compromised on the long stone bench above, near the finest wall in 
Machu Picchu. When they were settled, I piled my bedding on the 
back of Ruminaui, and drove him away into the humid, viper-teeming 
darkness Sailing under sealed orders, he tore his way fearfully 

476 




The temple of the three windows, an unusual feature of Inca architecture 




mvw- 






'Rumifiaui" seated on the intiliuatana, or sun-dial, at the top of the town, from which the 
world falls away a sheer 2000 feet to the Urubamba below 



A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

through the undergrowth that clutched at him with a thousand unseen 
fingers, down through the jungle-grown heart of the town and knee- 
deep across the sacred plaza, its three great windows staring all but 
invisible at us in the night. On I pursued the trembling wretch into 
the three-sided high-temple, the most imposing structure of Machu 
Picchu, and three times bade him pile his load up on the stone altar 
before he would believe his ears. When I murmured " illimni " (" all 
right"), he turned tail and fled so suddenly that he forgot even the 
customary leave-taking. 

Above, below, and all about me the night was chanting its mysterious 
pagan song. The distant roar of the Urubamba came up clear and 
sharp. In the sky above, myriad stars shone forth with that unusual 
brightness of upper heights. The rest was blackness. I cleared away 
a few plants and parasites from the altar and the niches above. It 
was an immense cut-stone fourteen feet long and five high, but a bare 
three feet wide, and a long drop for an uneasy sleeper. I rolled out 
saddle-blanket and ponchos to form the " bed " o-f many an Andean 
night; then unconsciously, in an instant, I solved the niche problem 
that has been harassing Peruvian antiquarians for centuries. Nothing 
could be simpler! The bygone race broke the long surfaces of their 
walls with these half-openings neither as settings for their idols nor as 
stations for their guards, but as convenient places in which to lay 
their leggings, hobnailed boots, and tin watches for the night. I 
am by no means the only one who will be glad to have the problem 
solved at last. 

It would have been easy for the high priest to have dropped in on 
me during the night, or to have sent his henchmen to do likewise 
with a few rocks and boulders, even if he could not have arranged 
for me a dance of his private nustas, especially as the temple is now 
roofless. But I slept the night through monotonously undisturbed, 
waking only once to congratulate myself on being so far removed from 
the disturbing living world, and falling asleep again without even 
feeling to find whether my revolver still hung within easy reach. 

Long wilderness travel seems to develop in the nostrils a. power to 
scent the dawn. I had finished dressing when the night began to 
pale along its eastern rim, and striding away through the dew-dripping 
jungle and down the great central stone stairway, I came upon the 
professor and Martinelli huddled together end to end on their roofless 
stone couch, snoring oblivious of the fact that the daylight in which 
nq true traveler sleeps had already come. The opportunity for cor- 

477 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

rection was too precious to lose. Close beside them I drew my re- 
volver and fired a roaring 38-caliber shot into the rosy dawn over- 
head. Mere words are powerless to picture the slothful pair as they 
exploded forth from their coverings, with the rampant hair and fist- 
like eyes of Puritans suddenly fallen upon by a band of Indians in 
the good old days when Puritans were fair prey. In the sacred cave 
below I found Rumihaui also sitting up in his " bed," scratching the 
sleep out of his eyes, and having sent him for my possessions set to 
boiling coffee while listening to the sad story of my companions. 

Barely had I left them to their own protection the evening before 
when Martinelli thought he felt a snake strike his boot, and shouted 
in alarm. (By morning light he found a cactus-spine had pricked 
him through the leather.) Then Ruminaui had come with a long 
and dolorous Quichua tale of the tribes of " viboras " that had their 
nests in the interstices of the wall beside and above them, and only 
awaited the stillness of the night to sally forth on their deadly er- 
rands. This in turn recalled to the professor that the so-called circular 
" snake-windows " were in this very building, and caused him to 
scrunch down, head and all, into his sleeping-bag, hoping against hope 
that no deadly viper could bite through its several thicknesses. To 
make life even more miserable, another gnat had stung him on an- 
other knuckle, — a voracious creature, evidently, so bent on destruc- 
tion that it had made a special trip up from the valley below for 
this nefarious purpose, since insects do not commonly inhabit Machu 
Picchu. Now, it might be that the first bite had not injected the 
dread uta, but surely no ordinary man could hope to survive a second. 
So that all the bitter night through the professor lay — or, more ex- 
actly, curved — rigid and motionless within his six-foot sleeping-bag on 
the extreme outer edge of the stone divan, as far as possible from the 
viperous wall, yet always in fear of taking the awful two-foot drop 
to the reptilian ground beneath, while before his sunken eyes passed 
in cinematographic succession the picture of the dread " rot " he could 
distinctly feel creeping and crawling through all his frame, devouring 
it limb by limb, feature by feature, the awful news seeping out into 
the Middle West that one of his most cherished citizens had been 
brought to grief by a mere insect of the Andes ! But enough of the 
harrowing details ! Yet the worst is still to be heard. All the endless 
night through things kept dropping down upon the sleepers from 
the wall above. To my unromantic mind these were bits of twigs 
and leaves, yet in the subtle silence of the tropical night small wonder 

478 



A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES 

each was a possible sudden-death to the sufferer within the sleeping- 
bag, assuring himself a thousand times that no viper could bite through 
it, yet lacking faith in his own assurance. The most anguishing 
moment of all was that when there dropped squarely upon him, with 
a soft, reptile-like thud, something that proved by daylight that he 
had hung carelessly in the Incaic niche above one of his woolen socks ! 

The descent was harder than the climb; also it was quicker. So 
slippery was the wet trail at that angle that whenever our heels failed 
to bite into the soil we sat down emphatically on the backs of our necks 
some feet further down the slope, fetching it a resounding wallop 
with the rest of the body. There is talk of some day building an 
electric line from Cuzco, and a funicular up to the ruins, with perhaps 
a tourist hotel among them. Fortunately talk does not easily breed 
action in Peru. One of the chief charms of Machu Picchu is inherent 
in the difficulty of reaching it ; a scene once made accessible to fat, 
middle-aged ladies is ready to be marked off the traveler's itinerary 
and to be turned over to the tender mercies of the- tourist. 

We ended the descent without broken bones, though not without 
shattered tempers, and finding the precarious connection with the outer 
world still sagging between the roaring boulders, climbed the wet 
jungled bank beyond. Here Ruminaui, in addition to his regular 
government wage of twenty cents, was rewarded with a shilling and 
a handful of coca-leaves, only the latter seeming to be of any interest 
to him ; and here, strangely enough, To.mas was waiting, as he had been 
ordered, with the four animals, their heads turned toward Cuzco. 



479 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

ON November nth I took train southward. Though my 
original plan of following the Inca highway from Quito to 
Cuzco had been accomplished, the thought of turning home- 
ward with half the continent still unexplored had become an absurdity. 
But the scattered life of that dreary region to the south of the Im- 
perial City promised too little of new interest to be worth covering 
on foot. If I did walk down to the station, behind my belongings 
on jogging Indian legs, it was because to have waited for the nine 
o'clock mule-car would probably have been to miss the nine-thirty 
train. 

Cuzco, like its rival to the north, has been connected by rail with 
the outside world since 1908. The train leaves on Tuesdays and Satur- 
days, spending a night at Sicuani and another at Juliaca, whence a 
branch descends to Arequipa. Every Friday there is a vertiginous 
" express " that makes Puno in one day. 

A fertile valley, the great bolson, or mountain pocket, that stretches 
from the pampa of Anta in the north to Urcos on the south, with 
many grazing cattle, frequent villages, and strings of laden Indians 
and asses, rolled slowly past. Before noon we caught the gorge of 
the muddy Vilcafiota, the same stream that under the name of Uru- 
bamba encircles Machu Picchu, with little patch-farms far up the 
face of the enclosing ranges and here and there steep, narrow side 
valleys rich with cultivation. Yet cultivatable ground was scarce, so 
scarce that it was easy to understand why the ancient population spared 
as much of it as possible by walling up their dead in caves and planting 
all but perpendicular slopes. 

Next day the valley rose gradually, until cultivation gave way com- 
pletely to cattle and sheep, then to llama and alpaca herds grazing 
on the tough ichu of broad punas stretching to arid foothills that, in 
turn, rolled up into a great snow-clad range on our left. An aggres- 
sive, despairing aridity, rarely touched with a cheering note of green, 
spread in every direction. A dreary land indeed would this have been 

480 



THE COLLASUYU, OR "UPPER" PERU 

to journey through afoot. Small wonder the race accustomed always 
to this desolate landscape is of melancholy temperament, given to 
personifying nature as a host of evil spirits inimical to man. 

The drear and barren land across which lay the branch line of the 
third day rolled ever higher to the Crucero Alto at 14,666 feet. Two 
large lakes, cold, steely-blue in tint, with a few barren islands, broke 
upon the scene and sank slowly as we panted upward; patches of 
snow lay above, around, and then below us ; the glare of the arid, sun- 
flooded landscape grew painful to the eyes, recalling that many an 
Andean traveler holds colored glasses an indispensable part of his 
equipment. Towns there were none; and the stations consisted of 
one or two wind-threshed buildings of stone or sheet-iron, dismal 
beyond conception. 

Then we descended gradually. Here and there in the edge of reedy 
lagoons stood parihuanas, — long-legged, rose-tinted birds the feathers 
of which in olden days formed the Inca's head-dress, when capital pun- 
ishment was meted out to anyone of lesser rank who dared decorate 
himself with them. Equally sacred were the vicunas, the undomesti- 
cated species of the llama family that furnished the imperial ermine. 
Ordinarily the traveler is fortunate to catch sight from the train of 
one or two of those timid animals. To-day a group of fourteen ap- 
peared not five hundred yards away across the pampa ; then within an 
hour we passed close by flocks of nine, twelve, seven, and eight re- 
spectively, a total of fifty, more than my Peruvian seat-companion, 
who crossed this line several times a year, had seen in all his life. 
Unlike the three domesticated species, llama, alpaca, and guanaco, the 
vicunas are uniform in color, a reddish-brown with whitish belly, 
legs, and tail, not unlike a fawn in general appearance. A more deli- 
cate animal could scarcely be imagined ; the neck seemed hardly larger 
than a man's wrist, the legs fragile in their slender daintiness. They 
were graceful, as well as swift, even in their running, which resembled 
the gait of the jack-rabbit in the way they brought front and hind 
legs together. The flocks still belong to the government as in the 
days of the Incas, when they were protected by royal edict, under 
penalty of death. For some ten years past Peruvian law, too, has 
forbidden killing them, but the valuable wool and skins are still to be 
had in the larger cities, for game-wardens are conspicuous by their 
absence. 

What seemed a hopeless desert thinly covered with dry, wiry bunch- 
grass, now spread in all directions. We were crossing the vast 

481 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

" Pampa de Arguelles," so named from the family that has leased 
hundreds of square miles of it from the government. They in turn 
grant the Indians permission to graze their cattle, — at 25 cents a year 
for larger animals, twice that for each flock of small ones ; yet " los 
Arguelles derive income sufficient to permit the family to live on the 
fat of Paris. Mirages, as of rivers flowing landward, appeared now 
and then across the arid immensity. At stations lay piled great heaps 
of yarlta, a fuel resembling a cross between peat and giant mushrooms. 
Further down, a scraggly bush was cut for the same purpose and car- 
ried in bundles on donkeys' backs. Soon that dreary Sahara of the 
West Coast lay on every hand, massive rocks piled up fantastically, 
monotonous to the last degree, yet not without a certain striking beauty 
under some moods. The landscape was what the Germans call 
eintonig, of a rich yellow-brown, dusted by the winds and bleached by 
the suns of centuries, and spreading away to infinity with a hint of the 
vastness of the earth which even the sea does not give. 

Suddenly a deep-green patch of alfalfa burst out among the glaring 
rocks, trebling their barrenness by contrast. It was the little oasis of 
Yura, fed by a small stream, the water of which, reputed efficacious 
to disordered livers, is bottled and sold — less widely to-day than 
before the priests, whose rival establishment produces the " Water 
of Jesus," threatened to blackball out of heaven anyone who drank 
the other. Then far away across the Egypt-tinted world the eye made 
out well below, at first dimly, a green oasis with a great, or at least 
a widespread, city covering about half of it. " Ari, quepay ! " (" Yes, 
let us stay a while!") the first settlers are said to have cried when 
they caught sight of this garden spot; and the train seemed like- 
minded, setting us down at last in Arequipa, second city of Peru. 
Three dawdling days had been required to cover 412 miles. 

The only place of importance between the Pacific and Titicaca is 
strikingly oriental in atmosphere, with a suggestion of Cairo, thanks 
to its shuffling donkeys — a hole is slit in their nostrils that they 
may more easily breathe this highland air — and its encircling desert, 
yet exceeding the latter in beauty by reason of the snowclads hovering 
about it. To the north lies Chachani, fantastic with its peaks and 
pinnacles and jagged ice-fields ; nearer at hand stands hoar-headed 
Misti, rivalled in symmetry of form only by Fujiyama and Cotapaxi. 
From any second-story roof the arid, yellow sand stretches away as 
from the summit of the pyramids to a horizon far more broken and 
tumbled than that of the Sahara. The hills are streaked with what 

482 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

looks like snow, but is really fine sand, the same sand that lies in waves 
monotonously multiplied in the form of wandering, crescent-shaped 
medanos nearer the coast, whence quantities of it are shipped to Europe 
to make a cheap glass. Down below and round about the city are fat 
cattle knee-deep in green pastures, in an oasis where irrigation pro- 
duces alfalfa, as well as many fruits, in abundance. The desert air 
is clear beyond words, bringing the newcomer from the bleak high- 
lands above the impression that summer, an unoppressive midsummer 
of the North, has suddenly come again. Every evening wonderful sun- 
sets, ranging from lurid pink through purple and blue-gray to a vel- 
vety fading slate, play a veritable symphony of color across the sur- 
rounding desert world. 

The city itself is flat, of one, or at most two stories, always with 
the bulking mass of Misti or its neighbors behind it. Earthquakes 
have been frequent in Arequipa. Because of these visitations, per- 
haps, the town has everywhere an unfinished appearance, most build- 
ings ceasing abruptly just above the first story and looking as if the 
rest had been shaken off or suddenly abandoned. A few have ven- 
tured to crawl up again to two stories, and here and there a bold 
adventurer to three, these latter, commonly of sheet-iron, seeming 
constantly to tremble at their own temerity. As in Lima and the lands 
of the Arab, the roofs are fiat, places of promenade and evening 
tertulias; for rain falls, if at all, only in brief afternoon showers. 
The town is built largely of a soft white stone, almost chalk in com- 
position, and light in weight as terra-cotta, which is chopped or sawed 
out of a desert quarry not far away and which, though it hardens in 
the air, can still be carved with a knife. Two arched bridges with 
massive piers, mildly suggesting those by which one enters Toledo in 
Spain, span the little cliff-sided Chili. The eucalyptus seems less at 
home here than in the higher cities of the Sierra, but drooping willows 
abound. As everywhere on the West Coast of Peru, massive mud 
fences afford places of promenade in the outskirts. 

I was treading close on the heels of civilization of a material sort. 
Electric street-cars had appeared in Arequipa a bare three months 
before ; with motormen imported from Lima they afforded an efficient 
service to nearly every corner of the oasis. The innovation had not 
been without its difficulties. Strolling one morning, I met three cholos 
driving a dozen donkeys marketward. Suddenly they began to shout 
and dance about the animals as if some danger were imminent. A 
block away sounded the gong of a bright new tramcar, but as I 

483 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

had never known one, least of all in South America, deliberately 
to run down an animal, I wondered at the uproar. To my surprise 
the car came on without slackening speed. The shrieking cholos suc- 
ceeded in hauling, pushing, or coaxing most of the stubborn brutes 
off the line, but one pair refused to vary their set course. At the 
last moment one of these lost courage and side-stepped, but his sturdy 
black companion kept serenely on, with stubborn down-hung ears and 
a " to-hell-with-you " flip of the tail — and just then a corner of the 
swiftly moving car caught him on the starboard beam. He turned 
a complete somersault on the cobbles, rolled on to his feet, and 
gazed after the still speeding car with a scowl not unmixed with a 
ludicrous expression of astonishment. Later I learned from the 
American manager of the line that a number of donkeys, burritos, 
and dogs had been killed during the first month of operation. De- 
crees and warnings had been utterly wasted, and Arequipa's donkeys 
would have stagnated the lines and again taken possession of the 
gait of life without this resort to the teaching of experience. 

Cuzco and Arequipa are reputed the Peruvian strongholds of con- 
servatism. Of the two, the latter is probably more deeply under the 
spell of the ancient church. The din of bells was almost constant; 
during my week in the city I saw no fewer than five images of the 
Virgin paraded through the streets to the usual accompaniment of 
kneeling cholos, bareheaded whites, and scores of sanctimonious-faced 
old beatas following with funereal step. Several of Arequipa's fiestas 
are noted for the dancing of wooden saints to barbaric music in the 
public squares. Others have fixed periods of calling on their fellows, 
sallying forth from their home churches to the plaza where, manipu- 
lated by the cholo bearers beneath, they bow to and finally " kiss " 
each other, to the fanatical applause of the multitude. The town 
boasts also several crucified figures operated by wires that cause the 
eyes to roll, the limbs to quiver, and the head finally to droop as 
in death, after which a gang of workmen, carrying towels over their 
arms to wipe away the " blood," climb up to remove the nails and 
lay the " body of Jesus " away in a glass coffin until the next holy day. 

From a score of stories typical of Arequipa with which I was 
favored by a fellow-countryman, who had spent many years as the 
alpaca expert of the chief local warehouse, I pass on two. For months 
he and his wife had been annoyed by the throngs of beggars who 
gathered for a bowl of soup each noon at the monastery just across 
the narrow street from his residence, and then slept out the day in 

484 




° -5 
















THE COLLASUYU, OR "UPPER" PERU 

the sandy hollows nearby, like the dogs of Constantinople. What par- 
ticularly aroused his ire were the habits of an old fellow of ninety or 
so, whom he had known for years. A few weeks before, finding him 
in the all too scanty remnants of what had once been shirt and trousers, 
the American had smuggled him into his workshop and given him a 
complete new outfit from his own wardrobe. The mendicant returned 
to his customary hollow a hundred yards up the street, which he was 
accustomed to share with several curs and a donkey or two, and 
during the night his fellow-beggars robbed him of the new garments. 
What, then, was the donor's surprise and American disgust when he set 
out on his early stroll next morning to find the old fellow parading up 
and down the street, begging of the women bound for mass in the 
monastery church "without a lickin' stitch on him, as naked as the 
day he was born. If you 'd tell it in the States, they 'd say you 
was lyin' and that he must have had a shirt an' britches on anyway. 
But, no, sir, just as I 'm telling you, without a lickin' stitch, an' 
parading his wrinkled old ninety-year carcass up an' down amongst all 
them women goin' to mass." 

But the ladies seemed merely to be mildly amused, and the native 
policeman saw nothing in the sight worthy of comment. Children 
now and then roam the streets of Arequipa in their birthday clothes, 
and the old fellow had long since been in his second childhood. My 
outraged fellow-countryman went across town to make complaint to 
his friend, the prefect. The latter did not see what he could do 
about it. 

"Why don't you send him to the hospital?" grumbled the alpaca- 
expert. 

" They would n't receive him, with no one to pay for his keep." 

"Well, sir, I couldn't stand it no longer having that ol' feller 
paradin' around before my house, with my wife inside an' all of them 
women folks goin' to mass, as naked as the day he was born. So 
next mornin' I borrowed a stretcher an' got four Indians, an' I says, 
' Now you git that ol' feller on that stretcher an' tie him down an' 
carry him over to the hospital an' leave him inside, or dump him in 
the river or anything you like, only so 's you git him out of here. An' 
I 've got a phone an' when I hear he 's inside the hospital I '11 give 
you each a sol.' Well, sir, them Indians just dumped him in the 
hospital payteeo before the Sisters of Mercy could shut the gates, an' 
they had to keep him. 

" I 've got a lot of friends amongst them priests across the road, 

485 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

even if I ain't a Catholic," he went on, " an' they 're a pretty nice 
lot o' fellers, take 'em all in all. They 's three kinds of 'em : the 
brown priests, the black priests, an' the white priests" (Franciscans, 
Dominicans, and Mercedarias). One especial, by the name of Jay- 
zoose, has been over here in my house off an' on for fifteen years to 
ask for a chicken or some eggs, or a few dollars to build a new altar, 
or to have a few drinks — Oh, they 're a pretty decent lot o' fellers, 
an' of course they 've got to live somehow. Well, Jayzoose — he 's 
livin' with a woman over there behind the monastery wall an' got 
four or five kids ; but then of course they all do that in Peru, though 
I suppose the Catholics up in the States would n't believe you if you 
told 'em, but of course you 'n me or anybody that 's been down here 
— well, Jayzoose come over the other day an' says he wants me to 
come an' hear him preach. So I went out to a church over here on 
the edge of town an' I tell you he preached a mighty strong sermon, 
too. Only it was All Saints' Day an' of course everybody was drunk. 
So I was layin' here readin' along in the afternoon^ when I heard 
somebody knock at the street door — or if I happened to be asleep 
an' did n't, Theodore Roosevelt " (pointing to a cross between a 
Dachshund and a pug curled up at his feet) "here, or Woody Wil- 
son " (an Irish terrier) " there did, for they always hear anybody that 
knocks, no matter if it 's midnight — an' I went to the door an' there 
was Jayzoose, an' he was pickled to the eyes. So I invited him in, 
an' he says, ' Why don't you give me something to drink ? ' An' I 
says, ' Well, Jayzoose, I ain't got anything in the house just now, 
but I '11 send out an' get something. An' I sent out an' got two bottles 
of beer. But Jayzoose was that drunk he could n't sit up, say nothin' 
of stand up, an' when the beer come he got to rollin' around an' out 
of his pocket drops a big loaded revolver. I picked it up an' says, 
' Here, I 'm goin' to keep this gun f er you. What are you goin' to 
do with a gun anyway ? ' An' Jayzoose says, ' I 'm goin' to kill that 
there Chilian blacksmith down the street, because he don't go to mass 
an' says he don't believe in the Holy Church an' its miracles ; an' if 
I 'd a had a couple of drinks more, I'd a killed him las' night.' An' 
I says, ' No, you don't want to kill that feller, Jayzoose, an' I '11 keep 
this gun fer you until to-morrow,' — an' I got up to help him home, 
an' when I opened the street door, in tumbles a woman that had 
been leanin' up against it — being All Saints' Day — an' just fell down 
into the parlor here ; an' by the time I rolled her out again an' got 
Jayzoose home I was sweatin' some, I can tell you." 

486 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

I strolled out one afternoon in a leisurely hour from the central 
plaza by a street growing ever rougher and less cobbled to the Harvard 
Observatory on the flank of Misti, with a splendid view of the snow- 
capped cone towering into the sky close beside it and a marvelous 
outlook over all the oasis of Arequipa. Here, in a household where 
it was easy to fancy myself suddenly set back in the heart of my 
own land, American scientists photograph the heavens on large dry- 
plates, with exposures of from one to eight hours, through telescopes 
automatically regulated to the speed of the earth, but requiring also 
constant hand adjustment. Arequipa, however, is growing less ideal 
for the purpose, since the number of its cloudy days has more than 
doubled. The blood-red sun was sinking behind the Sahara hills 
when I turned homeward through the caressing air of evening, the 
desert flanks of Misti and Chachani and Pichapichu glowing a velvety 
red from the reflection of the opposite horizon, the white oriental 
city growing dimmer and dimmer, then suddenly bursting out in a 
spray of electric .lights above which the two white spires of the cathe- 
dral more than ever resembled minarets. 

Next day I returned to the highlands in the private car of the 
railway superintendent, a fellow-countryman. The day was brilliant, 
the leprous desert flashing in the sun even after it had given way to 
the ichu-brown tablelands of the great plateau, Misti bulking as large a 
hundred kilometers away as out at the observatory on her flanks, and 
snow-caps springing up into the luminous sky about us to all points 
of the compass. All the afternoon we loafed in cushioned armchairs 
facing the back platform, on which sat our host shooting with auto- 
matic gun-pistol at vicunas, a pastime strictly against the law, but 
Peruvian statutes scarcely reach the altitude of a railway superintend- 
ent. Fortunately the animals were scarce and far away, and the near- 
est he came to breaking the law was to raise the desert dust about them 
and send them scampering across the rolling pampa at a lope between 
that of jack-rabbit and a deer, sparing us the necessity of halting the 
train and sending out the crew to bring in the game. From Juliaca 
we turned south along a flat once-lake-bottom. Arms and branches of 
Titicaca, full of shivering reeds, broke in upon the dusk that thickened 
into night just as we pulled into Puno, cold, dreary, and monotonously 
like all other towns of the high Sierra. 

I had timed my arrival to take, instead of the regular steamer directly 
across the lake, the semi-monthly " Yapura " that makes the round of 
its shore, with many stops. We were off at ten and out upon the 

487 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

"open sea" by midnight, a huge distorted moon rising off the star- 
board bow, into the prismatic wake of which we wheezed slowly but 
steadily, until it crawled up under the black skirts of the clouds that 
covered the edges of an otherwise starlit sky. A wind as penetrating 
as that off Cape Race caused our diminutive craft to roll and plunge 
merrily, to the distress of the priest, lawyer, and home-made Ph.D., 
with whom I shared the six-by-eight dining-room-cabin. Titicaca by 
day-light has the identical color of the sea itself, and we awoke to find 
ourselves wheezing along in mid-ocean, so to speak, at eighteen knots 
— every two or three hours. We cast anchor first before the red 
town of Juli, in a lap of bare hills sloping up from the steel-blue 
lake. I dropped on top of the first boatload of cargo and went 
ashore, the captain, having orders not to start without me, promising 
to blow a special signal. The Jesuits claim to have set up in Juli the 
first printing-press in America, and here Quichua was first reduced 
to writing. To-day it is a mere dawdling village, distinguished by 
the voluminous Dutchman breeches of its Indians. At noon Pomata 
held us long enough to unload the priest and a few boxes and bales 
at the usual cobblestone wharf. This same good padre had assured 
me that it was a well-known fact that Saint Thomas had visited 
America before the Conquest and had brought the Indians their civil- 
ization, being known to them as " Tomi " — a bit familiar, to say the 
least. How persistently mankind seeks to rob poor old Columbus of 
his glory! 

In the afternoon we churned into a wide, semi-circular bay as far 
as shallow water and rustling reeds permitted, and I was soon climbing 
the easy slope to Yunguyo. Here and there was much freight to dis- 
charge. When I expressed my surprise at the consumptive powers of 
so small a town, the captain winked an Irish-Peruvian eye and breathed, 
rather than murmured, " contrabando." I had come at last to the end 
of endless Peru, with the unexpected privilege of walking out of it, 
as I had entered it eight months before. Yunguyo lies on the neck 
of a little peninsula, part of which, by the arbitrariness of interna- 
tional frontiers, is Bolivian. The steamer had orders to pick me up 
in the morning, and slipping on kodak and revolver, I struck out 
for the sacred city of Copacabana. A league from the landing the 
road mounted a stony ridge, passed through the two arches of an 
uninhabited rural chapel, and left the historical, if sometimes pro- 
fanity-provoking, land of Peru forever behind. 

To that day I had never, to my knowledge, met a Bolivian. Those 

488 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

born beyond the boundary evidently kept the fact a profound secret, 
and in Peru the silence about the adjoining land was as if it were on 
the opposite side of the earth. Once in Bolivia it was as rare to 
hear anything of Peru. It was a stony country, in fact there were 
more stones than country. Everywhere they lay piled up in high mas- 
sive fences with half-tillable patches between them. The wide road 
was well-peopled with Indians afoot, Indians darker and of more inde- 
pendent mien than those of Cuzco. This was the route by which, 
according to tradition, Manco Ccapac set out from the island of Titi- 
caca to found the Inca Empire. The countrymen were engaged in a 
sort of planting and plowing bee, a half-drunken festival, their hatbands 
decorated with newly picked flowers. The instant I passed the bound- 
ary the head-dress of the women changed to an ugly, round, narrow- 
brimmed felt hat hitherto unknown. On the Peruvian side the shores 
of the lake had been reedy and shallow, lisping with water-birds and a 
melancholy wind from off Titicaca, as if the sea were thinking sadly of 
its lost glory. But as I topped the ridge of the peninsula, there opened 
suddenly before me the vast steely-blue lake, as clear-cut against the 
base of the reddish-brown hills as if dug with some gigantic spade, 
rolling away in one direction over the horizon like an Atlantic, the 
velvet-brown island of Titicaca standing forth in the middle distance 
sharp as an etching. Rocks, which the superstitious Indians fancy 
are impiotfs men turned to stone, stood forth on every hand. Children 
along the way addressed me as " tata," the Aymara version of the 
Ouichua " tayta " (father). 

At the end of a five-mile stroll the stony highway broke forth into 
a little lake-side town. The church and monastery sacred to Our 
Lady of Copacabana, roofed with glistening green and yellow tiles, in 
a square surrounded by heavy walls brilliant with the crimson fior 
del Inca, nestles in a lap of rocky hills a bit back from the lake and 
bulks high above the haunts of mere men at its feet. In the days 
of the Incas this was a holy city, with a certain " idol of vast renown 
among the Gentiles," a place of purification whence pilgrims em- 
barked for the ultra-sacred island of Titicaca. The church militant 
would not have been itself had it lost this opportunity of grafting its 
own superstitions on those of the aboriginals, and some three cen- 
turies ago the present " Virgen de Copacabana " was set up, with the 
usual marvelous tale of her miraculous appearance in this spot. Her 
servants have been realizing richly on their foresight ever since. A 
steady stream of pilgrims pours into the holy city from Peru, as well 

489 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

as Bolivia, and even from further off, the year round, though August 
5 and February 2 are the days of chief festival and mightiest crowds. 
Near the monastery is a large hospicio, a two-story lodging-house for 
pilgrims, with a great rectangular patio opening through an archway. 
In the town roundabout is that curious atmosphere of a mixture of 
piety and commercial advantage common to Rome, Jerusalem, Benares, 
and Puree, an air of something hard to believe, yet highly advantageous 
to accept, at least outwardly. The costumes of the populace had 
grown frankly Bolivian. In several of the shops stocked with sacred 
baubles, facing the immense grass-grown plaza, women were rolling 
cigarettes, new proof that I was in Bolivia, for to roll a cigarette in 
Peru is the exclusive privilege of the government. 

The priest of Pomata had given me a note to the superior of the 
monastery. A doorkeeper led me into' pillared cloisters opening on 
a flower-grown patio and softly into the sanctum of Father Basoberri, 
deep in conversation with a parish priest who had brought a flock of 
pilgrims from a neighboring town. Being a European, he created a 
better impression than the average native churchman. To celebrate 
my arrival he ordered a servant to uncork a bottle of imported beer and, 
after the first formalities, had him set me down in the monastery din- 
ing-room, where an excellent meal stopped abruptly short of dessert and 
coffee. The superior conducted me in person to the large brick-and- 
tile room reserved for distinguished guests, opening on the now bitter- 
cold expanse of Titicaca, and advised me to fasten the padlock and 
put the key in my pocket, " for though we are here in a monastery, 
there are people passing back and forth, and it is safer. Now," he 
went on, " if you wish to see the customs of the pilgrims, you have only 
to mount that stairway." 

I climbed two stone flights in semi-darkness and found myself in 
a narrow wooden gallery at the back of a large, high chamber suf- 
fused with a " dim religious light." It was painted blue, with a 
sprinkling of golden stars, as nearly the painter's vizualization of 
heaven, no doubt, as the crudity of his workmanship permitted him to 
express. Confession and a contribution to the attendant priests are 
requirements for admittance to the floor of the church below. At the 
further end stood the gaudy altar, in its center a glass-faced alcove 
containing the far-famed Virgin of Copacabana. The figure, scarcely 
three feet high, was cumbered with several rich silk gowns, laden with 
gold and jewels, and with a blazing golden crown many sizes too large. 
Round-about her were expanses of golden-starred heavens, and half 

490 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

a hundred of what looked to a layman like large daggers threatened 
her from all sides. The original blue-stone idol had been destroyed 
by the Spaniards, the present incumbent having been fashioned in 
1582 by Tito-Yupanqui, lineal descendant of the Incas. He was no 
artist, but was said to have been inspired by the Virgin herself. 

The place was unusually immaculate for the Andes, as becomes a 
famous shrine where money pours in the year around, and was in strik- 
ing contrast to the squalor of the surrounding region. The entire floor 
below was crowded with kneeling pilgrims, weirdly half-lighted by 
candles, except around the altar, where there was light enough to make 
priests, acolytes, and the Virgin stand out brilliantly. A week is the 
customary length of stay for pilgrims, with a ceremony of welcome 
and one of dismissal, separated by a long series of masses, confessions 
and purifications — not to mention the ubiquitous fees. It is perfectly 
well-known throughout the length and breadth of the Andes, as the 
priest from the neighboring town, having taken me in hand as soon 
as I appeared in the gallery, whispered above the rumble of the serv- 
ices, that Nuestra Sefiora de Copacabana is an all-round champion 
in the miracle line. For instance : Hardly a year back she had picked 
up a ship about to be wrecked on the coast of Chile and set it out a 
thousand miles or so into the mill-pond Pacific, merely because one 
of the sailors had had the presence of mind to call upon her at the 
height of the storm. The newspapers of the time seem to have cov- 
ered the service poorly. Or there was the case of the Indian in my 
cicerone's own parish who, working in his field far up the side of 
a mountain sloping swiftly toward Titicaca, suddenly fell headlong 
down the precipice. He would infallibly have been dashed to pieces 
on the rocks below, had he not suddenly, halfway down, uttered the 
name of the Virgin — - personally I never knew the mind of an Andean 
Indian to work with such rapidity — and instantly found himself 
comfortably seated back in his own field again. The fact should not 
be lost sight of, however, in rating this marvel that the Aymara hus- 
bandman cheers on his labors with an even stronger chicha than that 
of his Quichua cousins to the north. 

The ceremony we were now witnessing was that of dismissing the 
departing pilgrims. At about two-minute intervals there knelt on 
the steps of the altar one person, a man and wife, or sometimes a man, 
wife, and child, always of the same family. An Indian acolyte in red 
thrust a lighted candle into a hand of each, the chief priest bowed 
down before the image, while back beside us in the gallery an Indian 

491 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

in a poncho pumped a wheezing melodeon and the choir, consisting 
of several boys, four old half-Indian women wrapped to the ends of 
their noses in black mantos, and three merry little girls who managed 
to keep up a constant gossip and game through it all, knelt on the 
floor about the instrument and moaned weird hymns. If the pilgrim 
was of the " gente decente " class, the hymn was in Spanish; if an In- 
dian, it was in Aymara. During the singing, and the chanting of the 
priest, another acolyte in a still more striking robe stepped forth and 
covered the kneeling person or persons at the altar with what looked 
like a richly embroidered blanket. This the priest beside me asserted 
was the Virgin's cloak, capable of protecting from all evil, for a certain 
length of time — varying, perhaps, with the fee. 

Then suddenly the cloak was snatched away, the candles were 
jerked out of the hands of the worshippers, the latter were all but bodily 
pushed aside, and a priest on the side-lines called out the next name 
from the list in his hands. This field-manager was startlingly un- 
Bolivian in efficiency, keeping things moving with a rush, and calling 
the next group almost before the acolyte reached for the blue 
blanket. The attitude of all those professionally connected with the 
ceremony, was scornful, careless, and hurried — like a New York bar- 
ber who is convinced there is no " tip " coming. The fifth group to 
appear, however, was less cavalierly treated. A tall, well-dressed 
man stepped forward, and an acolyte quickly slipped in front of him a 
prie-dieu, or prayer-stool with high back, of the style used in church 
by well-to-do South American women. Then, to my surprise, two 
young men in riding breeches and leggings, who had been standing 
near us in the gallery, stumbled over each other in their haste to get 
down to the floor below and kneel on either side of the older man. 
" Ese caballero," whispered the priest beside me, with a distinct tone 
of pride in his voice, " is a famous lawyer and ex-senator from La 
Paz, and those are his two sons. They are great devotees of the 
Blessed Virgin of Copacabana." 

When the cloak had been laid away for the night, the chief priest 
mounted a pulpit projecting from the side- wall, and in the same drawl 
in which he had chanted at the altar, compared with which the notorious 
American nasal twang is soft and songful, either preached a sermon, 
or recited a bit from the Bible, or imparted some stern orders from 
the Pope — which, neither I nor, I am certain, any other hearer not 
previously informed ever guessed. For the monotonous drone in 
which he hurried through the thing, like a man with an appointed 

492 




Indians plowing on the shores of Titicaca. Those behind break up the clods with wooden 

mallets 




Sunrise at Copacabana, the sacred city of Bolivia on the shores of Titicaca 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

tryst, was such that during the full twenty minutes it lasted I had not 
the faintest notion whether it was in Latin, Spanish, or Aymara. The 
only intelligible word I caught was an often-repeated, slovenly " Co- 
pavan." Then the acolytes hastily snuffed the candles, and we filed 
out. At the foot of the stairway my companion was fallen upon by 
an old Indian and his son who, imprinting a rapid-fire of kisses on his 
by no means lily-white hands, begged him to hear them confess. He 
waved them aside as one might an importunate cur, until the Indian, 
redoubling his osculations, assured him he had real coin to pay for 
the service, whereupon the good padre took courteous leave of me 
and led the pair to his room in the monastery. 

I was hurrying into my clothes in the bitter cold Titicaca dawn, 
when the faint long-drawn whistle of the " Yapura " was borne to my 
ears. To my astonishment it was barely five, so great is the differ- 
ence in the hour of sunrise in the few degrees I had moved south- 
ward since leaving Cuzco. Copacabana in its lap of terraced hills 
shrunk into the past as we slipped away around the peninsula of the 
same name. Before us rose the Island of the Sun, traditional cradle 
of the Inca race, yellow-brown and mountainous, with terraces far 
up some of its rugged valleys, one red-roofed village housing the 
workmen of General Pando, chief owner of the island. It pro- 
duces potatoes, maize, and quinoa. On the mainland, too, all the 
shores were terraced and cultivated from the water's edge to the tops 
of the ridges and hills, in long, square, rectangular, or such fantastic 
shapes of fields as the lay of the land required. To the east the great 
glacier mass of Sorata, by some reputed the highest peak in America, 
lay piled into the sky, half-hidden and cut off from the solid earth by 
vast banks of white clouds. Before long we passed, a bit further off, 
Coati, the Island of the Moon, a low ridge terraced from end to end, 
constituting a single hacienda noted for its fertility. Mere words 
give but a faint notion of the beauty of Titicaca on a brilliant morn- 
ing, with its striking combinations of soft colors, — the dense blue-green 
of the lake, curtained by tumbled banks of snow-white clouds, the 
velvety' yellow-brown islands and mainland, with the faint-purple cloud- 
shadows playing across them. The mighty glacier bulk of Sorata 
piercing the sky seemed to move forward also, as the steamer slipped 
lazily on, frequently bringing into view new and more delicately beau- 
tiful combinations of the same elements. 

The Bolivian mainland we drew near in the early afternoon was of 
a reddish soil, with many patches of bright green and pretty little 

493 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

tilted fields checkering the ridges clear down to the water's edge. At 
Guaqui, the landing-place, no train was to leave for twenty- four hours, 
and I set out afoot across the exhilarating plains of Bolivia for Tia- 
huanaco, twelve miles away. It was a fertile, well-plowed land, where 
the remaining stubble suggested wheat as the chief product. The sun 
dropped behind a dense, blue-black bank of clouds hanging like a pall 
over Titicaca behind, and there was no sunset when the time for it 
came, but only a gradual, steady fading of light to a faint gleam in 
which the eyes could barely make out the ground underfoot. The 
evening stillness was broken only by the rare lowing of a cow afar 
off; a shower that was half hail and all cold beat stingingly into my 
face. But for the storm and wind, an absolute silence lay like a solid 
wall on every hand, with nowhere the suggestion of a light, the many 
clusters of Indian huts that had speckled the plain by day seeming to 
keep disconfidently out of reach of highway and railroad. 

At eight I stumbled into the station building of Tiahuanaco. The 
telegraph operator was sufficiently impressed by my familiarity with 
the name of the gringo superintendent to induce the woman across 
the track to serve me stale bread and native cheese, and tea made of 
the water of Titicaca, brought here in locomotive tanks. On the table 
were several of the. dailies of La Paz — it was difficult to think of 
that city as " the capital " after eight months of considering Lima the 
center of the universe — in which the world's news all at once jumped 
up to date. But it was like reading a serial story of which one has 
lost several chapters and finds it impossible to pick up all the threads 
again. 

Tiahuanaco, 12,900 feet above the sea, in a broad, open, unpro- 
tected plain, frigid by night, and not over warm by day under the 
chill blue of its highland sky, is the chief archeological enigma of 
" Alto-Peru." The most important ruins lie a few hundred yards 
north of the station, and an equal distance from the modern adobe 
town with its bulking stone church. From a slight rise of ground the 
flat plain, sprinkled with many clusters of mud huts, stretches away to 
a gouged and broken ridge, here reddish, there green with vegetation, 
that fences it in. Huge blocks of stone lie tumbled and scattered 
over a vaster extent than at Luxor and Karnak, in a disarray at once 
suggesting earthquake ; for they seem too immense to have been over- 
thrown by a merely human destroying vengeance. In the region 
roughly known as Peru there were several detached and separate 
civilizations, some of which clearly antedated the Incas; and Tia- 

494 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

huanaco has little in common with the ruins further north. There 
the relics consist almost exclusively of stone walls; here there are 
virtually none, though excavations might uncover a few remnants. 
What is left looks, in contrast to the stern practicability of " Inca " 
ruins, like the caprice of some childish sovereign. But it is not cer- 
tain how justly we may judge of the whole original plan, since not 
only the neighboring hamlet, as well as La Paz, has helped itself 
freely to the materials for its own chief buildings, but the railroad has 
carried off vast quantities of it for the construction of bridges and 
culverts. The still existing monuments are chiefly immense stone 
blocks too great to be moved by puny modern man, some still upright, 
some fallen. Bas-reliefs, of which Machu Picchu offers none, are 
numerous ; sculptured figures are unknown among the ruins of Peru, 
while here there are several. Some resemble totem poles of stone. 
The most striking is a sturdy rock god, his features defaced by the 
revolver shots of the enlightened youths of La Paz on their Sunday 
excursions, which, like the twin figures of Thebes, sits abandoned out 
on the plain. The monolithic gateway, a single block of dark gray 
stone on which the intricate carving and bas-reliefs still stand forth 
clear yet inscrutable, has been set together again since Squier's day. 

As I sat gazing across the disordered mystery of long ago, an In- 
dian woman, the ubiquitous bundle and second generation on her back, 
a crude sling in one hand, drove her pigs out into what seems once to 
have been the main square of the ruined city. As the animals fell to 
rooting about among the ruins, the woman walked across to the in- 
scrutable stone god and bowed down before it with a strange, heath- 
enish courtesy. I attempted to work my way around to leeward in 
the hope of catching a photograph of the aboriginal rite. But while I 
was still some distance off, she either spied or scented me, and raced 
away toward the town at a greater speed than I had ever before wit- 
nessed in one of her race. 

In the modern town dwells an indolent, not to say insolent, popula- 
tion of cholos and Indians, ignorant as the Arabs of the Nile of the 
motive that brings strange beings from far off to view the disdained 
remnants of long ago, yet ready to take all possible advantage of that 
absurd custom. The place bids fair to become as overrun with the 
pests of tourist centers as the show-places of Europe. Already the 
stranger is greeted by a rabble of unsoaped urchins, offering for 
sale as " antigiiedades " all manner of worthless pebbles. Aware that 
visitors, for some strange reason, are interested only in things of great 

495 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

age, these children vociferously proclaim everything in sight " muy 
antigua," even to the loaves and meat displayed in the shops, a state- 
ment for which there is some basis. The bulking church of the town, 
as well as portions of the rudest edifices, is constructed of splendid 
cut-stone. On either side of the entrance are the weather-worn torsos 
of a man and a woman, crudely carved from reddish sandstone, sadly 
defaced, and having an even greater air of antiquity than the chief 
monuments out on the plain. They would be more properly in their 
setting out among the other ruins ; here they are startling as one bursts 
unexpectedly upon them facing the empty grass-grown plaza of the 
dawdling village. 

The train snorted in soon after noon. Across the bleak Collao 
spring plowing was at its height, amid much ceremony. Many of the 
sleek oxen were half-hidden by the red and yellow flags of Bolivia, 
set upright on .the yoke across their horns. Gay streamers and ban- 
ners decorated animals and plow, while the Indian family that in 
each case had come in full force to see the propitiation of the spirits 
that rule over the fields, was garbed in its gayest. For not only must 
the moon be in a particular phase, but all gods must be won over, all 
demons exorcised, and all signs promising, before it is worth while to 
begin the year's sowing. What a fertile plateau it was, compared to 
stony Peru, the plowing unchecked over hill and dale of the slightly 
rolling plain as far as the eye could see ! 

An official passing through the train to examine the bundles for 
contraband was the only formality that had marked the passing of 
the frontier. In the second-class car I began to gather the impression 
that the Aymara Indian, if morose and even less given to smiling, 
was on the whole a more promising type of humanity than the Qui- 
chuas. For though he was more inclined to insolence, he was far less 
obsequious, more manly than the slinking race to the north, less passive 
and obedient, more bellicose and jealous of his rights; and as long as 
there is any fight left in a man, there is still hope for him. 

The day waned. A plowman driving his oxen homeward and carry- 
ing the plow on his own shoulder is a touch Gray did not catch. The 
plain grew less fertile, and was dotted now with countless stone-heaps ; 
Illimani and a long, half-clouded snow-range grew up before us ; we 
climbed somewhat, though the world roundabout seemed level as be- 
fore. The railroad swung to the left. The scores of mule, donkey, 
and llama pack-trains, however, kept straight on across the bleak, 
stone-heaped plain, till suddenly at a white pillar a few miles away they 

496 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

seemed to drop all at once into the unknown over the edge of the near 
horizon. 

Where the train halted I scorned the electric trolley and, walking a 
few yards, saw suddenly burst upon me a scene for once superior to 
the anticipation, — La Paz, America's most lofty capital, in its hole in 
the ground. Up there at the "Alto," 13,600 feet above the sea, all 
was brown, cold, barren, unenticing; all about, behind, and around 
me the bleak, uninhabited Andean plateau, stony and drear, cherish- 
ing nothing but bunches of tough ichu, stretched away like a faded 
brown sea to the hazy distance. Then at my very feet this gave way, 
and all the nearby world pitched headlong down into a gashed and 
broken chasm 1200 feet down, measuring perhaps two miles across 
from where I stood to an equal height on the tumbled and ramified 
foothills opposite. These, breaking and splitting and falling away into 
unseen valleys, and climbing out again to become more rugged and 
higher ridges, finally culminated in a vast and jagged mass of snow and 
ice, cut off from the solid earth by banks of clouds, above which the 
reflection of the descending sun streamed «in brilliant rose color upon 
the glaciered pinnacle of giant Ulimani, 24,500 feet above the sea. 
Across the broad puna a cold, fitful wind whistled lugubriously ; down 
below, though barely a sound of life except the blood-stirring snort of 
a regimental band came up this sheer quarter-mile from the city, all 
seemed pleasantly cozy and warm. 

The lower flanks of the great cuenca were checkered with little 
Indian farms, now mostly light-brown from being newly plowed, some 
still the brownish-green of old crops, and all hanging at a decided 
angle. Further down, on the floor of the valley itself, were similar 
irregular patches, chiefly of the brilliant green of alfalfa, of every con- 
ceivable shape, — round, triangular, horseshoe, veritable " Gerry- 
manders " in the strange forms given them by the configurations of 
the ground ; for, once down below it, this proves by no means so floor- 
flat as it seems from above. In the very bottom of the valley, rather on 
the further side and stretching a bit up the opposite slope, lay La Paz 
itself. It was a compact city, so compact that it seemed one con- 
glomerate mass into which the eye broke only once, — at the tree- 
roofed central plaza, tiny from here as a green paster on a vast wall- 
painting. From this height one saw little but the roofs, the dull-red 
of the tiles greatly predominating — almost too much red, as in the 
garments of an Indian gathering; next came the white and colored 
house-walls, then the sober gray of old churches, and finally here and 

497 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

there the edge of a blue, green, or even an orange wall peering above 
the mass. 

All about the city proper, imperceptibly joining it and stretching 
away on nearly all sides over vastly more space than the town itself, 
were perhaps half as many buildings, scattered singly or in small clus- 
ters, forming an almost unbroken row down the valley to the south- 
eastward. Here and there one of these ostentated itself in brilliant 
red; most of them were cream-color or the gray of sheet-iron; and 
everywhere between them were the irregular green of plowed patches, 
with now and then a grove of blue-green eucalyptus, or a patch of 
willows, enticing from this treeless height where, once the eye rose 
a bit from the floor of the valley, there was not the suggestion of a 
shrub. Not the least striking feature of the scene was the glassy 
clearness of the atmosphere, with nowhere a puff of smoke, and abso- 
lutely nothing to dim the view ; if the clock in the all-too-slender tower 
of the congress building had been larger, it would have been easy to 
tell the time by it. 

Brown ribbons of roads, all starting at a pillar on the plateau above, 
strung like drippings of syrup down all sides of the cuenca, except 
on the rugged, uninhabited flank opposite; and along all of them 
on this Saturday afternoon crawled at what seemed a snail's pace 
files of Indians with their laden donkeys and llamas, the cargoes 
generally covered with straw, the drivers chiefly in red ponchos, 
though so like tiny crawling ants were they from this height that the 
colors were barely noted. Seldom broken, these strings of pack-trains 
stretched from the edge of the plateau to where the head of each pro- 
cession to the morrow's market was swallowed up in the compact, 
silent city. 

I walked on around the yawning chasm, the wind that howled across 
the puna reaching the very marrow of my bones, a raging hail-storm 
beating upon me for a brief moment and making the city below seem 
doubly snug and serene by contrast. The little " Great River " of 
La Paz one did not see at all, so tiny is it and worn so far down 
into the clay soil of the valley in a half-seen gorge descending through 
tumbled ranges of gnarled hills toward the yungas, as the Bolivian 
calls the tropical montana, below. Mere words give but a faint no- 
tion of this lower end of the cuenca of La Paz. For so broken and 
pitched and tumbled, so fantastically gashed by the rains is it, that 
it would be an indescribably beautiful thing, even if there were not 
added the wonderful colors and half-tones, a rich dark-red pre- 

498 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

dominating, over the countless split and torn and every-shape hollows 
and needles and pinnacles of earth across which the cloud-shadows 
play incessantly. The mournful notes of a quena, or rude Indian 
flute, floated sadly by on the wind. Then sunset crept relentlessly 
across the valley to the town that seemed to crouch motionless with 
fear of the darkness descending upon it, paused a moment to do its 
work well, swallowing up all before it in the purple twilight of tropical 
altitudes, then climbed slowly again out of the hollow on the further 
side and spread at last across all the world. The city's bright colors 
had faded to an indistinct sameness, the brown hills and deeply eroded 
clay cliffs were blotched red by the departing sun, though the snow 
peaks above were still ablaze with light ; the purple bases of the range 
receded into black, then into nothing, leaving Illimani standing forth 
white and cold, stone-dead as a once ardent hope, utterly alone in the 
luminous sky of the Andean night. 

I descended afoot behind the last pack-train, a stony, thigh-aching 
half-hour from the pillar to the central plaza. The first information 
to reach me was that La Paz outdid in cost of living even Lima, which 
is criminal. The boliviano having but four fifths the value of the sol, 
I had fancied prices would be correspondingly lower; but here two 
units were often required where one had sufficed before, and the 
great majority scorned to do business in smaller coins. The hotels 
which my sadly mutilated letter of credit permitted me to enter were 
not only unsavory and atrociously managed, but had the barbarous 
custom of several beds in a room. Each in turn attempted to thrust 
me into a rumpled nest, with four or five others of unknown national- 
ity or antecedents close beside it, within a battered door to which there 
was neither lock nor bolt. Whatever else I may be, I am distinctly 
not a gregarious being in that sense; whereupon they offered me a 
room with only one companion, as if there were any particular virtue 
in numbers ! I brought up at last in the " Tambo Quirquincha," facing 
the Plaza Alonzo de Mendoza, an inn favored almost entirely by 
natives arriving on horseback. 

The constitution of Bolivia asserts that Sucre is the real capital, 
but permits congress to choose its place of meeting, and " because of 
the constant danger from our two chief enemies" (Peru and Chile) 
" at the northern end of the Republic, the Government really resides 
in La Paz." How much the choice is governed by the fact that there 
is no railroad, but only a mule trail, to the " real capital," is a matter 
of conjecture. At any rate, the president has not been in Sucre in 

499 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

more than a dozen years, congress has its seat in La Paz, and the 
head of the army resides there — conditions which will no doubt con- 
tinue, at least until the railroad reaches Sucre. On the other hand 
the former " Chuquisaca " is honored with the presence of the su- 
preme court and the archbishop of Bolivia, who do not have to 
move often enough to make mule trails burdensome. But Sucre will 
not be comforted. Her chief newspaper is named " La Capital," 
each of its editorials ends with the argument "La Capital!" and 
it always refers to La Paz as " the present seat of Government." 

This " seat of Government," perhaps the most Indian capital of all 
South America, has the most purely Spanish name. It should still be 
called Chuquiyapu, as the aboriginals refer to it to-day, rather than by 
the trite Castilian designation that is duplicated a score of times 
throughout Spanish-America. The census of 1909 discovered 76,559 
persons in the entire hole in the ground. Of these, 20,007 were rated 
" white," but as usual in Latin-America the enumerators got the color 
sadly mixed with the social position of the enumerated. Indeed, the 
chief of the census goes on to explain " white " as " descendants, more 
or less pure, of Spaniards, Europeans, or North Americans " — in 
other words, anyone with a distinct trace of European blood. There 
may be a third that many of strictly Caucasian race. Of the 3458 
foreign residents, 86 were Americans ; of 696 non-Catholics, 562 were 
foreign men, 40, foreign women, 193, Bolivian men (" chiefly athe- 
ists"), and one Bolivian woman. Bold woman, indeed, to admit it! 
The census rated 30% of the population as Indians ; but here again the 
social status must have played its part, or else there are many non- 
resident country Indians often in the city. African blood is extremely 
rare, though slavery was not abolished until 185 1. It is no climate for 
negroes. " The unmarried American women are nearly all teach- 
ers," the report continues, then takes a rap at the country's chief enemy 
for stealing her seaport and bottling her up within South America by 
remarking, " Las chilenas living in La Paz are almost without excep- 
tion prostitutes." Most striking of all the data, perhaps, is the fact 
that of the 60,445 inhabitants over nineteen years of age, only 13,047 
are married. But this does not mean that race suicide is imminent; 
rather that the priests have made the cost of marriage all but pro- 
hibitive to the lower classes, and that many others are thereby in- 
fluenced to consider the ceremony of minor importance. In the en- 
tire republic 16% are " alfabeticos," that is, " know their letters," 
a much more handy expression in Latin-American statistics than 

500 




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bo a .c 

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■£ -O 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

" read and write." Only Honduras, in all America, is so low in this 
respect. 

Roughly speaking, the population is divided into three classes, as 
everywhere in the Andes, each shading into the other until the lines of 
demarkation are at best hazy. Of the whites, the census report itself 
asserts, " Sequestered, they knew more of theological subtleties than 
of religion, were more devout than moral, and had more preoccupa- 
tions than ideas. There is even to-day no stimulus for their best 
faculties, and they have lost almost completely that virile character 
bequeathed them by their Spanish ancestors. They will work only at 
commerce or government employments that demand no corporeal fa- 
tigue." Effeminate is the description that most quickly occurs to 
the foreigner ; but they are no more so than all men of the " gente 
decente " class throughout South America. Even the whites take on 
something of that sulky disconfidence, that unobliging insolence of the 
Aymara character, and one quickly catches the feeling that the 
foreigner is disliked in Bolivia, at least far more so than in Peru. 
Another native, with the point of view of wide travel, assures us, 
" The whites are really Indians and cholos in their mode of thought. 
Thanks to the Aymara blood in his veins, or to the effect of that en- 
vironment on his character, the paceno lacks docility, is uncommuni- 
cative, and is bored at all times at everything; hence his desire for 
excitement, for noise, and the resultant life in the canteens. In the 
three cold cities of Bolivia more liquor is consumed than in all the rest 
of the country ; alcoholism is the national vice par excellence, and the 
surest way to win a fortune is to run a bar." 

But in any strict census the cholo is the most numerous class of La 
Paz. A native writer succinctly explains the rise of this mixed race : 
" As in the beginning the Spaniards had not within reach many women 
of their own race, they satisfied the physical and moral necessities of 
the sex with women of the vanquished tribes. ... A few of these suc- 
ceeded in inspiring real passion in the breasts of the hardy Conquista- 
dores, sometimes even to the extent of causing the latter to marry 
themselves legally and Catholicly with our Indian women." All hail 
to the inspiring Indian women ! One must not, however, overlook the 
fact that " real passion " among the old Spanish Conquistadores was 
not so closely allied to soap and tooth-powder as in our own days. 
Short and sturdy — especially the women, who do not wear themselves 
out with dissipation — with quick little eyes, the cholos have much of 
the independence of the Aymara character; they are quite the oppo- 

501 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

site of servile, and somewhat despise both the whites and the 
aboriginals. 

No country of South America has so large a percentage of pure 
Indian population as Bolivia. The Aymara is by nature silent and 
aloof, more sullen and cruel than the Quichua, and by no means so 
obsequious as the aboriginals of Cuzco. He never touches his hat 
to a passing gringo; unlike the Indian of Quito he crosses the main 
plaza in any dress he chooses, even carrying bundles and sitting on the 
benches; in the region roundabout, the race has inner organizations 
under their own chiefs which are virtually independent of the Gov- 
ernment; yet in town he does as he is ordered, though sullenly, and 
shop-keepers drag him in to perform any low task at whatever reward 
they choose to give him. As pongo, or house-servant, he is farmed out 
as a child and becomes virtually a slave, — though that condition wor- 
ries him little. A frequent " want-ad." in the papers of La Paz runs : 
M Se alquila pongo con taquia," that is, there is for rent an Indian serv- 
ant with necessity of gathering for his master llama droppings as 
fuel. Festivals and fire-water are his chief amusements. Sunday he 
reserves as a day to get drunk, and couples are reputed to take turns 
at this recreation, so that one may be in condition to lead the other 
home when it is over. His music is melancholy beyond words. As 
a Bolivian puts it, " He lives without inquietude and without remorse, 
being dangerous only when he is full or liquor or religion. He is a 
beast of burden, uncomplaining, desires nothing, is apparently content 
with his fate, and looks with supreme indifference on all the rest of the 
world and its people." 

The contrasts of life in La Paz are striking. Here an ancient scribe 
sits before a typewriter agency; there a group of Indian women 
squat before the crude products of the country, in front of the elec- 
tric-lighted emporium of a foreign merchant ; electric tramways thrust 
aside trains of llamas even in the principal streets. Speaking of these 
street-cars, they crawl back and forth across town, sometimes zig- 
zagging whole blocks for every street; and the dishevelled carriages 
for hire are generally drawn by four horses. For La Paz is broken 
and steep, often held up in layers by retaining walls, while the side- 
walks are often toboggan-steep and always slippery. Houses which 
from the " Alto " seem on the level are found to be a hundred feet or 
more one above the other. It is one of the easiest cities to get lost in 
without being really lost; for one always comes out finally on some 
corner where a familiar landmark or half the city stands forth to 

502 



THE COLLASUYU, OR "UPPER" PERU 

orientate one at once. Many a street is crowded with Indians from 
the country, and especially with chola vendors who, there being no 
regular market-place, spread their wares where they will, squatting in 
unbroken rows on the sidewalks and driving the uncomplaining pedes- 
trian into the slippery cobbled streets. One does not hurry in La 
Paz; the air is too scanty. A bogotano complained that he could not 
sleep there on account of the altitude ! The temperature ranges from 
6 degrees Centigrade in June to 18 in this mid-summer month of 
December. Yet even then it was somewhat wretched after sunset, 
and no one would choose to sit in pajamas in the central plaza at night. 
From eleven to three it grew almost uncomfortably warm for climbing 
about so up-and-down a place, and the brilliant unclouded sky was 
hard both on eyes and nerves at noon-day. 

It is difficult for the stranger to get accustomed to seeing droves 
of llamas, with drivers dressed in the style of Inca days, soft-footing 
across the main plaza or patiently awaiting their masters, with the 
modern congress building as a background. Congress, by the way, 
was in session during my days in La Paz. The visitors' gallery is 
high up above the perfectly circular chamber, giving the half-hundred 
representatives the appearance of being down at the bottom of a deep 
well. They smoked frequently, spoke sitting, were largely white, 
though the cholo class was by no means unrepresented, and among 
them were two priests in full vestments, their tonsures shining up at 
us like rays from the Middle Ages. There were also several who 
strangely resembled Tammany politicians of the popular cartoons, 
and nowhere was there any outward sign of genius, legislative or other- 
wise. While the man who had the " floor " kept his seat and droned 
endlessly through something or other, the presiding officer sat motion- 
less and openly bored, and members slept, smoked, read newspapers, 
wrote letters, and otherwise busied themselves with the vital problems 
of the nation, after the fashion of legislative bodies the world over. 

There is a distinct gradation in the costumes of La Paz, especially 
among the women. The men of the " gente decente " class, the whites 
and the consider-themselves-whites, ape Paris to the best of their abil- 
ity, as in all Andean capitals. The higher-class cholo, ranging from 
shoe-makers to clerks — in both the American and English sense — 
wears more or less countrified and ill-fitting " European " garb, even 
to gloves and a cane on Sunday, if he can get them ; for social standing 
depends chiefly on dress. The less ambitious half-caste wears the 
same leather sandal as the Indian, a coat showing a bit above or below 

503 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

his more or less crude-colored poncho, a coarse shirt without collar, and 
a heavy felt hat. A peculiarity of the pacefio costume, as universal 
among the Indians and poorer cholos as the cord around the knee of 
British workmen, is a slit in the back of the trouser-leg, showing a 
white, pa jama-like undergarment above the bare brown ankle. The 
Indians, conservative as all their race, are slow to adopt the slightest 
change, and still dress much as in the time of the Incas. The men 
wear peaked knitted-wool " skating-caps " of gay colors, with earlaps, 
like clowns in a circus, often with a felt hat of varying tones of gray 
on top of it. Their ponchos of alpaca-wool are of solid colors, — 
orange, scarlet, purple, magenta — with some tone of red always the 
ruling favorite. Much of this cloth has for years come from Ger- 
many, though there is still considerable native weaving. Some go 
barefoot ; more often they wear the heavy, well-made leather sandals 
that are displayed in large quantities in the market-stalls. 

But the men of La Paz lend it little color compared to the women. 
These may be roughly divided, following the local phraseology, into 
" senoritas," " cholas," and " indias " ; though these in turn subdivide, 
until there are six rather distinct costume classes, all shading some- 
what into one another. First: The foreign women and a small 
number of native white ones copy the styles of Paris with more or 
less success. Second : The moderately well-to-do woman — and all 
those of the "gente decente " class during the morning hours of mass; 
it being against the rules to wear a hat in church — wrap them- 
selves from head to foot in the jet black manto that gives them the ap- 
pearance of stalking crows. These commonly powder their faces with 
what seems to be cheap flour, and are rarely startling in their beauty, 
though many are physically attractive between the ages of seventeen 
and twenty-three. 

Third (to be marked Baedeker-fashion with two stars) comes the 
most picturesque figure in Bolivia, if not in South America, — la chola 
de La Paz. Her mate may blossom out in all the atrocities or " Eu- 
ropean " attire, but la chola clings tenaciously and wisely to the cos- 
tume of her ancestors. Moreover, in this case the picturesque is not 
attended by its usual handmaid, uncleanliness. La Paz is not im- 
maculate by modern standards, but at least la chola does her share 
toward making it seem so. She wears the usual multiplicity of skirts, 
but of a finer material and better fit than elsewhere, so that while she 
is still somewhat bulky about the hips, she is not disagreeably so. 
Her outer skirt is always of a solid color, distinctly gay, but never of 

504 




"Suddenly the bleak pampa fills away at one's feet, and La Paz in its hole in the ground, 1,200 feet below, spreads out at the foot of 111 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

the crudeness this garment attains among the Indian women. Of well- 
woven cloth, it stops just halfway from foot to knee, never high 
enough to suggest immodesty and never low enough to drag on the 
ground, as is the distressing custom among many of the middle-class 
women up and down the Andes. Above this she wears two shawls — 
at least that is the nearest English equivalent in a male vocabulary — 
of some excellent material closely resembling silk, with perpendicular 
stripes of varying width and color, the whole gay in the extreme, yet 
never clashing with the rest of the costume so far as the mere male eye 
can detect. These being large, they are folded in the middle and thrown 
about the shoulders, a glimpse of the inner one adding to the gaiety of 
the ensemble, the fringe of both sweeping her ankles. Her hair, 
jet black, and coarse as a horse's mane, she parts in the middle and 
combs flat on either side, the ends of the braids, without the 
suggestion of a decoration of ribbon or flower, hanging sometimes in- 
side, sometimes outside the shawls. From her ears swing heavy 
earrings of fantastic design some two inches long. Most striking 
of all is her unique hat. This is of straw, of " Panama " texture, with 
the general form of our derby or the Englishman's " bowler," lacquered 
or glazed over with something that causes it to reflect the brilliant 
sunlight of these heights like a mirror, and seeming at first sight as 
absurd and out o( place as our own " 'ard 'at " might to a visitor from 
Mars. 

But one soon gets used to it, and even to like it, especially as la 
chola wears it at just the suggestion of a rakish angle, ever so slightly 
inclined over the right eye, though the near-certainty that she is 
wholly unconscious of that fact only adds to the attractiveness. When 
she grow* excited, as in arguing the price of a nickel's-worth of beans 
in the market-place, she has a way of giving the front rim a flip of the 
finger that knocks the hat back from her brow, under which circum- 
stances she so vividly recalls a Western " drummer " in a heated but 
friendly argument in a bar-room, that one sighs with regret that she 
has not a half-burned cigar protruding at an aggressive angle from the 
corner of her mouth to complete the picture. 

There remains but to speak of her footwear. This consists of a high 
shoe, native-made, on a very Parisian last, with high, slender " French 
heels," of every color a shoe could be by any stretch of propriety, but 
with cream or canary-color the favorite, a bow of the same material — 
it seems to be kid — down near the toe and a bundle of tassels at the 
top. Occasionally the shoes are high enough to join company with 

505 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the halfway-to-the-knee skirt, below which peers the white lace of an 
inner petticoat, but even then when she stoops over in arguing a pur- 
chase, one notes a " clocked " stocking, that adds still more to the 
debauch of colors, going on up — at least to where it is fitting for a 
stranger to cease investigation. 

Astonishment grows that la chola can afford such garments. The 
shoes alone cost as high as $10, and every stitch in sight is of a grade 
and workmanship that come high in Bolivia, that would not, indeed, be 
cheap in a far more productive country. Yet the chief wonder is the 
specklessness of her entire garb — doubly wonderful to one of long 
Andean experience. The glazed hat shines like the polished dome of 
a mosque, the skirts and shawls always look as if they had just that 
moment come out of a Parisian shop, and the cream-colored shoes 
have not a fly-speck upon them; yet la chola wears this costume at 
any hour and under all circumstances — in the street, at least — and 
carries on her often soiling business in all parts of town. Some assert 
that she starves herself to dress; but her appearance does not uphold 
the contention. However she affords it, it is to be hoped that the 
means will continue, and that she will not some day abandon in favor 
of the atrocities of foreign fashions the most picturesque costume in 
South America, and the chief decoration of every outdoor scene and 
public gathering in La Paz. 

The chola is not exactly chic; the thicksetness bequeathed her by 
Indian forebears makes that word fail. But she is as nearly so as the 
Andean Indian type can become ; and as she trips along at a " snappy," 
energetic stride up and down the break-neck cobbled streets of La Paz, 
in her slender-waisted " French heels," and not only does not break 
her neck but does not even jar from its angle her " stiff 'at," the eye is 
as certain to note her passing as it would that of a meteor in the sky 
above. She is always full-cheeked and plump, often good to look at 
in spite of her rather bulky Indian features, and aggressively inde- 
pendent, going anywhere at any time she chooses in complete indiffer- 
ence to the oriental seclusion that still clings about the upper class 
women. She treats the rest of the world with a manner midway be- 
tween sauciness and impudence, scorning anything on the plane of 
reading and writing with the disdain of her Indian forebears. She 
holds most of the places in the market and the pulperias, or little liquor 
and food shops, and ranges all the way from small shopkeeper to un- 
servile serving-maid to well-to-do women. One gets the impression 
from a brief acquaintance that she is as superior to her mate, the shifty- 

506 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

eyed cholo, as are the women of Tehuantepec to their men. She speaks 
Aymara by choice, but will use Spanish when necessary; and she is 
always at least comparatively young. One sees cholas up to thirty or 
thirty-five, but as they do not look as if they died off at that age, the 
natural conclusion is that they fall into a more somber and less agree- 
able costume. La chola is seldom married ' legally and Catholicly," 
but if she has a baby, a mishap that not infrequently befalls her, she 
wears it as all Andean women wear their babies, — on her back. In- 
stead of being carelessly slung in a blanket tied across mother's chest, 
however, this fortunate mite sits in a whole nest of clean, gay gar- 
ments, the spotless white lining hanging down a foot or more on all 
sides of it, ending in a lace fringe. Indeed, this better care of baby is 
notable in La Paz, and has its influence even among the Indian women. 

But I set out to give a half-dozen female classes. The fourth is the 
same chola, just a shade lower in the scale. She also wears a little 
round hat, but of brown or black felt. Her skirts and shawls are less 
gay and of coarser texture, her stockings are dark, and her footwear 
a shining-black, low slipper without heel. The fifth is usually a com- 
mon servant, almost touching on the Indian woman, her garments 
sometimes descending to the plebeian, crude-colored, made-in-Ger- 
many-and-in-a-hurry bayeta in which the higher grade chola would 
scorn to be seen, though it is almost universal to her class elsewhere in 
the Andes. She wears also a shiny black slipper, but no stockings, 
though her brown plump leg looks almost like finely woven silk. There 
is no suggestion of immodesty in this absence of nether covering, yet 
when one of this class, for some sojourning-gringo reason, suddenly 
appears in the bare white legs of what at first glance seems a lady of 
our own race, the sight brings something of a shock. Of the three 
types of chola, the third and fourth may blend a bit, sometimes to the 
extent of coiffing the latter in a glazed hat ; but only the first ever falls 
into the foolishness of the " upper " class in flouring her face a bit, 
and at worst it is confined to a few sporadic cases. 

At the bottom of the scale, as everywhere in the Andes, comes the 
Indian woman, varying a bit in garb, according to the degree of her 
poverty. She wears the round felt hat and endures the chill highland 
winds by wrapping several thick bayeta skirts of clashing colors around 
her waist in bunches, until she looks like — ■ I am at a loss for a com- 
parison that is ugly, awkward, and bulky enough ; — may I say, like a 
very badly packed sack of assorted hardware with the looser and 
lighter things above the compressed middle? She likes red best, and 

507 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

as the day warms, every second or third of the skirts she removes one 
by one is of some shade of that color. Below them are bronzed legs 
and either bare feet with hoof-like soles, or, as La Paz and vicinity are 
distinctly stony, as well as cold, with a flat sandal of a single piece of 
leather, with thongs over the heel and between the large toe and the 
others. Solidly built as she is, one wonders how the Indian woman's 
waist can support the weight of six or eight heavy bayeta skirts. 
Yet always, in addition to these, night or day, young or old, drunk or 
sober, filthy or only dirty, she carries a bundle on her back in the 
colored blanket tied across her chest, with, whenever possible — and 
her possibilities in this line are infinite — the head of a baby protrud- 
ing somewhere from the load, now gazing earnestly at the road ahead, 
now dancing a crowing hornpipe on the broad back of the utterly un- 
responsive mother. 

Now, mix all these types ; put at least half the male population in gay 
ponchos, with every known shade of saffron, red, orange, purple, and 
the like; sprinkle among them youths with long hair tied in queues, 
wearing gay-striped ponchos that conceal all but their sturdy brown 
legs, who straggle up out of the tropical coca-country to the east to 
mingle with the city life ; add a distinctive costume for each surround- 
ing village, the noiseless llama-driver in his absurd cap, a number of 
Germans in Bolivian army uniforms, monks in black, brown, and white, 
nuns in gray, soldiers in light-gray uniforms, policemen in brown 
ones, hundreds of personal idiosyncracies in color and style, and it 
will be more easily understood why La Paz is justly entitled to that 
overworked word " picturesque," and why the aboriginal name of 
Chuquiyapu would still be more fitting than the trite Spanish one by 
which Bolivia's unofficial capital is known to the world. Moreover, 
children dress exactly like father or mother as soon as they can walk. 
La chola's little girl is her mother's exact miniature, glazed hat, gay 
shawl, fancy little high-heeled shoes and all, as likely as not with a doll 
in fancy garments on her back ; the cholo's son paddles behind his father 
in long breeches slit up the back, gay poncho and felt hat; the little 
Indian girl trots after her mother in the selfsame red, green, or 
magenta skirts of bayeta, the round felt hat on her head, and always a 
bundle on her back, though she be barely three years old and the burden 
only a bundle of yarn — as if to accustom her early to the life she 
must lead to the day of her funeral. 

There are many fine walks in and about La Paz. On a sunny after- 
noon, brilliant-clear as an afternoon can be only at this height, it is a 

508 




Llamas of La Paz patiently awaiting the return of their driver 




Down the valley below La Paz the pink and yellow soil stands in fantastic, rain-gashed cliffs 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

joy to follow a muddy little creek, known as the Chuquiyapu, down 
through the broken and tumbled gorge below the town, where the clay 
soil, now sandy white, now soft red, is rain-gashed into a hundred fan- 
tastic shapes. The slender, always-at-home eucalyptus and a species 
of weeping- willow line the way. Illimani raises its hoar head higher 
and higher into the sky above, seeming to calm the spirits with its 
majestic serenity and promise of perpetual coolness. So impercep- 
tibly does the valley descend that one could drift clear down into the 
languid tropical yiingas that draws one on like a lodestone, like the 
" spicy garlic smells " of the Far East, until suddenly realizing how 
far the city has been left behind, one takes oneself figuratively by the 
neck and turns back to the town. 

Or there is the climb out of the cuenca itself, a stiff hour to the 
pillar above. Once on the bleak puna, I wandered along the edge of 
the chasm to get a view of the city below from all angles. Near the 
station my eye was caught by the private car of a railroad superin- 
tendent. Fancying it might be that of my host on the journey up 
from Arequipa, I strolled toward it. A dishevelled fellow, his ragged 
coat close up around his neck, his long hair protruding like straw from 
a scarecrow, a two weeks' black beard bristling, sat on the back plat- 
form, peeling potatoes. 

" Esta aqui el Sefior ? " I asked casually. 

A cloud of incomprehension seemed to pass over the scarecrow face. 
I repeated the question, thinking he might be one of those weak- 
minded natives so often found at large in South America. 

" English ! English is all I talks," came the startling reply out of 
the depths of the unshaven one, not only the accent but the presence of 
a few blackened stumps in lieu of teeth betraying both the nationality 
and the caste of the speaker. .As I had never since leaving Panama 
seen a white man, much less an English-speaking person, doing manual 
labor my mistake was natural. 

Thanks to the pleasure of having a hearer who could understand 
him, the exile's sad, not to say jumbled, story was soon forthcoming. 

" I 'ad a good iducation, d' ye see," he began, " sent to collidge an' 
all that ; but I tykes it into my 'ead t' go t' sea. An' I was first-cabin 
steward on the ' Dinkskiver ' — I 've my papers an' discharge, an' ready 
t' show 'em t' any man — an' we runs int' Australy, an' I goes t' the 

Club there, an' a gentleman he introdjuces me t' the club, which 

is where all the best gentlemen belongs, d' ye see. An' 'e says, ' Look 
'ere, if you 'd like t' stop ashore we '11 get the captain t' sign y' off an' 

509 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

we '11 put y' up as steward t' the club, d' ye see — I bein' a first-class 
cook an' can bake an' do any kind o' cookin' — an' I got me papers an' 
discharges right 'ere with me t' prove it. An' it was a right-o job, 
one o' the best jobs I ever 'ad, s' elp me. So I was steward t' the 

Club, d' ye see — an' I '11 show the papers provin' it t' any man 

interested — but fin'ly one day I blew that job, d' ye see ; an' I was 
three years out in Australy. But finally one day I says t' myself, ' I 
might as well see America, too.' An' I 'ad my passage pyde clean 'ome 

t' Liverpool, d' ye see, on the Roossian steamer , an' we come 

across t' Ayqmque first, she bein' bound round the 'Orn 'ome t' Liver- 
pool. But three of us gets ashore in /fyquique, d' ye see, an' we was 
messin' about there an' — an' — lookin' about, d' y' understand, an' fin'ly 
we was left ashore there in Ayqulque, d' ye see, not 'avin' got on board 
again before the packet sailed. An' the British Consul 'e says, ' Well, 
I '11 do anything I can fer ye, boys.' An' I 'ad money too, d' ye see, 
an' my passage was pyde clean 'ome t' Liverpool on the Roossian, only 
she slipped 'er ' ook while we was ashore an' there we was stranded in 
Ayquique. 

" So then I gets up t' this 'ere Arequeepy " (It turned out later that 
he meant Arica) " an' I 'ad money on me, d'y' understand, but I was 
lookin' about an' seein' if I could n't get work, d' ye see, an' messin' 
about 'ere an' there, an' fin'ly I 'ad n't no money left an' was on the 
beach there in Arequeepy. An' so I tykes on with the boss 'ere as 
cook — I bein' a first-class cook an' steward — an' the boss 'e likes me 
all right, too, d' ye see. Only d' ye know what 'e 's pying me ? Sixty 
bally paysoze a month ! That is, I sye 'e 's pying me that, but not a 
blightin' tanner 'as 'e give me yet, an' s' elp me, I ayn't so much as 'ad 
a shave since I took up with 'im. So finally I says, ' Well, 'ere, sir, I 
wants me money.' An' the boss says, All right, 'e 'd pye me all right, 
only 'e 'ad n't riothin' with 'im t' pye me then, the banks bein' all closed 
on a Sunday; an' 'e says, ' Well, I '11 tell ye what I '11 do. If you '11 
go up t' Bolivy on this 'ere trip I 've got t' make, I '11 pye ye soon as 
ever we get down again,' d' ye see. So I says, ' That '11 do me,' an' we 
come up 'ere. An' I ayn't 'ad my clothes off on th' ole bolly trip, an' 
cookin' all the time. The boss 'e likes me all right, d' ye see, but I 
don't know 'ow about this 'ere Peruvan in the ki'chen with me, seein' 
as 'ow I can't understand 'is bloomin' lingo. An' I only jus' left a 
good cookin' job account o' a black feller. 'E was always pickin' up 

with me, an' fin'ly one day 'e calls me a , an' I says, 

' You 're another, ye black ,' an' so I quit an' got this 

5io 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

'ere job with the boss — anythink at all t' keep y' afloat when y' re 
stove in, d' ye see. An' yesterday mornin' we stops at a place, d' ye 
see, an' the boss says, ' Well, now, Joe, rustle out an' buy some per- 
visions ' — an' me not knowin' a word o' the bally lingo ! An' then 
las' night when I 'd served 'em coffee at 'arf past midnight, the boss 
says, ' Well, ye might as well turn in an' do a wink o' sleep, Joe.' So 
I turns in under the dinin'-room tyble ; only I could n't sleep any all 
night fer the cold. Nobody 'ad took the trouble t' tell me it was cold 
up 'ere, d' ye understand, an' bein' in the tropicks I did n't see 'ow it 
could be — an' me been livin' in North Australy where it 's a 'underd 
an' twenty in the shyde. But I says t' myself, d 'ye see, I '11 tyke one 
blanket along in cyse I 'ave a chance t' turn in on the trip. Only one 
blanket don't stop the cold at all 'ere, d' ye see, an' when the boss 
comes int' the dinin'-room this mornin' an' says, ' Well, Joe, let 's 'ave 
some coffee,' I 'ad n't slept none whatever. An' I 'ave that funny 
feelin's, my legs all 'eavy an' achin' an' feelin' that bad in the back 
o' the neck I don't know but I 'm took with somethink. I '11 tell ye 
this ayn't no white man's country, tyke it from me. When I gets 
down again, if the boss '11 give me my money, I 'm goin' t' make fer 
'ome full speed a'ead, I 'm tellin' ye an' not ashymed of it. It 's all 
right-o fer you that talks the lingo an' as got 'ardened t' the cold. But 
fer me that could n't sleep a wink all night fer bein' that cold — 'ere in 
the tropicks, too — an' that busy cookin' day an' night I ayn't 'ad my 
clothes off /On the trip, an' this 'ere achin' in my legs, d' ye see, as if 
I 'd been took with somethink. . . No, I ayn't been down t' the city, 
though o' course I see it from up 'ere, an' I was wonderin' what place 
it would be, bein' a moderate fine lookin' town fer these 'ere foreign 
countries. But we '11 be goin' back t'night ; the boss '11 likely be 'ere 
any minute. An' I comes of a good family, d' ye see, an' they '11 be 
'appy t' see me 'ome again, they will. They give me a good iduca- 
tion an' sent me t' collidge an' all that, d' ye see ; only I took it int' me 
'ead t' go t' sea an' come out t' Australy, an' I '11 show any man me 
papers — " 

But the bitter night air that was beginning to sweep across the 
plateau was not the only reason I decided to be on my way. 

As the sun sets gradually down through the cuenca of La Paz, so 
it rises, gilding first the western precipice far up near the edge of the 
plateau, plainly seen from my pillow in the " Tambo Quirquincha," 
then slowly crawling down into the valley until, long after its first 
appearance, it finally floods in upon the city itself and lights up its 

5" 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

streets and eastern house-walls. On such a cool, sun-flooded morning, 
known to the calendar as December fourth, a cholo boy of eleven 
presented himself to carry my baggage to the station, and did so 
easily, though I should have groaned at the load myself. The second- 
class coaches, here tramcars, left first, and slowly corkscrewed up out 
of the valley, the motorman, once we were started, coming inside 
where it was a bit less frigid, closing the door behind him, and giving 
all his attention to two comely cholas whose little black eyes jumped 
about like those of guinea-pigs. 

On the " Alto " a brilliant sun somewhat tempered the biting cold 
of the puna at this early hour. At Viacha a better train awaited us, 
her engine turned south, — big vestibuled cars, marked " Ferrocarril a 
Bolivia " and plying to Antofagasta, a smooth, well-built road-bed 
that spoke of Chile and more modern countries, a diner ready for 
those who did not choose to buy boiled goat and frozen potatoes of 
the skirt-heaped Indian women squatting at the stations. Once off 
across the sandy, bunch-grass wilderness, flat as a sea, with herds of 
llamas grazing here and there, and little farms of all shapes hanging on 
the slopes of far-off and gradually receding hillsides, the train sped 
on as if it never intended to stop again. In truth there was little 
reason to do so, for it was as dreary a region as the imagination could 
picture. The few stations at which we halted briefly, single, wind- 
swept huts on the edge of salt marshes, bore names fitting to the land- 
scape, — Silencio, Soledad, Eucalyptus — here a lone tree afforded the 
only feature to which a name could be attached. Now and then 
mirages across the dismal desert gave the lomitas the appearance of 
islands, the heat waves seeming to be water lapping their shores. 

In mid-afternoon Oruro arose across the brown pampa, as Port 
Said rises from her muddy sea, and we rumbled into a flat, miserable, 
if from the miner's point of view important town, gloomy, bleak, per- 
haps the most desolate city my eyes had ever fallen upon. The squat 
adobe buildings, chiefly one-story, were in many cases thatched over 
tile roofs, giving them the appearance of wearing a weather-worn hat 
over colored caps, like the Indians of La Paz. Reddish-brown, 
utterly barren desert hills, with mine openings, formed the background. 
The wind drove the sand like needles into our faces and seemed bent 
on cutting our eyes out. Cholas ostentated themselves in somewhat 
the same costume as those of the seat of government, but dulled 
and soiled by the all-pervading dust. Siberian, dreary, comfortless, 
the place seemed, yet its stores were well-stocked, and there were 

512 




Cholas of La Paz, in their striking costume 



THE COLLASUYU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

more gringos per capita than I had seen in many a day. Seeming to 
hate themselves and life in general, even the Americans had a 
haughty, unapproachable air, as in so many mining towns of the 
Andes, the unconscious result no doubt of caste treatment of Indian 
workmen. 

I was only too glad when the train on a newly-constructed branch- 
line carried us off northeastward late next morning. A long string of 
mud monuments still marks the centuries'-old route across the track- 
less desert. Beehive-shaped huts of mud huddled in the sunshine 
here and there. We climbed in long zigzags over the crest of the 
Cuesta Colorada, drear hills of broken rock where only a scant brown 
bunch-grass finds foothold. Below the divide hearty gringo faces, 
more cheerful in this lower altitude, broke in now and then on the 
monotony of Latin-American features. Many tents marked with 
large letters " F. C. A. B." lined the way, interspersed with the stone 
kennels of workmen and their women, and the swarming natural con- 
sequences. There is something about a railroad construction-gang 
more suggestive of the world's progress than almost any other labor 
of man. 

The new line petered out in the stony village of Changolla, some 
sixty-five miles from Oruro and halfway to Cochabamba, which it is 
in time due to reach. A stage-coach offered accommodations for the 
rest of the trip; but the joy of jolting all day in the thing was not 
commensurate with the pleasure of a new experience, even had the 
fare for both passengers and baggage not been prohibitive to a scan- 
tily supplied wanderer. " See Sinclair there," suggested the gringo 
chief, pointing to a sandy, unshaven Scot of more than six energetic 
feet, who was superintending the loading of all manner of railroad 
material into ponderous two-wheeled carts ; and the hint was sufficient. 

Changolla would have been excited that night were it possible for 
railroad constructors of long experience in many wild regions to be- 
come so. A fellow-countryman and predecessor of the New Zealander 
in charge of the camp had gone on a rampage with an American youth 
and turned bandits, in dime-novel style. Filled with distilled bravery, 
they had " held up " a nearby camp under the impression that the pay- 
master had arrived, and disappointed in this, they had shot a harmless 
Chilian employee. It took some time and all my papers to calm the 
suspicions of Changolla before I was offered lodging with the New 
Zealander. The " bandits " had sworn to shoot him and his assistants 
on sight, and a cardboard had been fastened over the window to pre- 

513 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

vent them from carrying out the threat by lamp-light as we ate, though 
none of the group showed any nervousness at the prospect. 

But the highwaying of the pair was amateurish at best. They had 
made no plans whatever for getting out of town, had even to ask the 
way, and had as provisions — two bottles of whiskey. Thus it was 
not strange that they were rounded up before morning, and my hosts 
showed no surprise when dawn disclosed the prisoners shackled in one 
of the box-cars. They had been taken, asleep, some ten miles from the 
scene of the crime, with a bottle in one hand and a gun in the other. 
The chief looked his fellow-countryman over, expressed his senti- 
ments with a " You 're a hell of a bandit, you are," lit a cigarette, 
and went on about his day's work. Mounted on asses, with a stick 
through their elbows behind them, the pair set out for Cochabamba 
guarded by a score of soldiers. The punishment for murder in 
Bolivia is to be taken back to the scene of the crime and shot, though 
there is many a slip between the law and its execution, and judges, 
according to my hosts, must be properly " greased " before they will 
even indict a criminal, particularly when the complainant is a rich 
foreign company. 

Meanwhile nine enormous carts, each drawn by six sleek and mighty 
mules, laden with all the bulky material required for railroad con- 
struction, to say nothing of my baggage, and covered in Forty-niner 
fashion, got under way. I set off ahead. The trail followed a broad, 
stony and sandy river-bed across which serpentined a yellow brook of 
brackish, luke-warm water which it was impossible by just two steps 
to cross dry-shod. The unfinished railroad flanked the barren, stony 
hills on the left, the embankment carved out of them being broken by 
unbuilt bridges and incomplete cuts and tunnels that cost me many a 
steep scramble. In the river-bed below passed a broken stream of 
Indians and cholos driving donkeys and mules, heavy-laden, as were 
most of the drivers themselves, their ponchos, chiefly of red with nar- 
row perpendicular stripes, standing out against the barren brown land- 
scape. Every little green patch on its edge was well-populated ; many 
a hacienda or small village having become a railway construction camp 
where haughty young Englishmen gazed coldly and suspiciously at 
one of their race sinking his caste to travel on foot. The Briton who 
has " knocked about " the world until the corners have been blunted 
is an agreeable fellow; but in his youthful, fresh-from-London days 
he is best avoided. 

The embankment gave out, and we struck a gorge where the carts 

5H 



THE COLLASU YU, OR " UPPER " PERU 

were saved only by the vigilance of " Sandy," astride his splendid 
macho, and the mules, as by a miracle. In the blazing, dusty, river- 
bed, sweat poured profusely as I plodded, clinging to the tail of a cart 
to be snatched across the ever-recurring stream. The towns were mis- 
erable, yet misery seems far less pitiful in perpetual summer. Worst 
of all, there was no water a man dared drink. The banks of the river 
were lined for broken spaces with large quantities of cobbles inside 
wire nets — an Argentine idea, according to the Scot — to keep the 
river from undermining and washing away the coming railroad. It 
seemed absurd to have to take such precautions against a tiny meander- 
ing brook, but in the rainy season this increases to a rushing torrent 
filling all the valley. 

It was starving mid-afternoon before " Sandy " called a halt for 
" breakfast," and the peons prepared a chupe, — a stew of potatoes, 
charqui, rice, and anything else that it occurred to them to toss into 
the pot. At sunset we camped like gypsies in the stony, wind-blown, 
waterless river-bed ; the mules were turned loose among several heaps 
of straw carried in one of the carts, and we rolled up in blankets on 
the sand. The drivers were a motley gang of Bolivian, Argentine, 
and Chilian cholos, each with the accent peculiar to his nationality. 
All had long knives in their belts and were inclined to use them on slight 
provocation. Several carried their wives, or at least their women, 
with them in the carts, sometimes with a child or two in addition. 

Next day as I plodded beside his long-legged mule, " Sandy " 
whiled away the long, hot hours with reminiscences. 

" Did they tell you in Juliaca how I cleaned out their damned hotel," 
he asked. 

They had, but I wanted " Sandy's " own version of the affair. 

" Well, we were playing billiards, when some greaser said some- 
thing about gringos, and I told him to shut up. The crowd was too 
drunk to know better, so I had to take a bunch of billiard-cues and 
clean out the thirty-two of them. It cost me just a hundred and 
twelve pounds — twelve for the greasers' doctor-bills and a hundred to 
get my iriend the subpref ect to lie low until I could get over the line. 

" Before the railway came I used to transport across the desert 
from Arica," he went on, steering his mule around a hollow of broken 
rock, " and I had a little dog named Bobbie Burns. He was a 
wise little dog, and as the desert sand burned his feet he got still 
wiser, and used to run way ahead of me, a mile or so, so far he could 
just see me, and then dig a hole in the sand and lie in it until I was a 

515 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

mile ahead and almost out of sight again; and then he would race by 
me with a ' how-d'-do ' yelp and dig another hole. A chileno 
greaser killed that little dog," said " Sandy," gazing dreamily across 
the mirage-flowing landscape, " and I never got a chance to do as 
much for him." 

The Capinota river we had been following, or rather criss-cross- 
ing, for two days came to an alfalfa-green village, exceedingly restful 
to eyes that had been gazing unbrokenly on the sun-flooded desert, 
and the trail struck off at right angles up a branch of a stream milky 
with dust. That night we camped again in the sand at the end of the 
haul, in celebration of which " Sandy " shaved and put on a purple 
neckcloth to scream at his red hair. There I took leave of him, with 
seventeen miles still separating me from Cochabamba. It was not the 
problem of transporting myself, but rather my baggage, that forced 
me to trot several times into blazing-hot Parotani in quest of a donkey 
— all in vain. At length — strange chances one takes in South 
America — I caught a total stranger bound for the city, and he was 
soon lost in the dust ahead, with all my possessions on the crupper of 
his mule. The sweating trail with its plaguing brook grew in time 
into a road on the left bank ; huts, then entire villages sprang up beside 
me; troops of pack-animals increased to an almost steady stream, and 
at four I overtook my baggage in Vinto, recovered it by payment of a 
boliviano, and was soon screaming in a little toy train on a 75-centi- 
meter-gage track, at the terrifying speed of an hour and forty minutes 
for the twelve miles, into the second city of Bolivia. 



5i6 



CHAPTER XIX 

ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

THERE are three such " railroads " running out of Cocha- 
bamba, though none of them venture more than a few miles. 
All were brought up piecemeal on muleback or on massive 
two-wheel carts, like the first steamers on Titicaca, for it is what the 
natives call a " mediterranean " town. One is a steam line with a 
single toy locomotive, which starts every hour from the central plaza, 
for the suburb Calacala, " noted " for its baths, splitting the ears 
with its infantile shriek and spitting hot cinders upon all the bench- 
holders in the vicinity. A cochabambino assured me that I could not 
believe it possible this " enormous " locomotive had been brought 
" from Germany " on muleback ; but as he had never been further 
out of town than its three little lines could carry him, his conception 
of locomotives was somewhat atrophied. This one was so childlike 
that once, when it suddenly started up as I was crossing the street, 
I unconsciously put out a hand to thrust it back until I had passed. 

Cochabamba, 60,000 inhabitants by its own count, the majority of 
whom have' never left its suburbs, is conceded to be the second city 
of Bolivia, and considers itself the first, after the South American 
fashion. It is constantly quarrelling with La Paz as to which shall 
furnish the country its president, a truce being usually patched up by 
alternating the honor. The population of Bolivia is made up of just 
such heterogeneous groups, among which there exists a profound aver- 
sion. The rivalry is particularly tenacious between the Collas, those, 
chiefly of the Aymara race, inhabiting the Collao, or northern portion 
of the country bordering on Titicaca, and the south of the republic, 
containing a large proportion of Quichua blood and partaking of many 
of the characteristics of that timid, dreamy race. Like the Quichua 
in general, the cochabambino is wedded to his native soil, with an 
ineradicable affection for it, partly because isolation keeps its customs 
largely unchanged. The tongue of the Incas is still the chief one of 
the lower classes ; the town's name, indeed, is derived from the 
Quichua words kocha (lake) and pampa (plain) — which the Con- 

517 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

quistadores as usual corrupted by pronouncing it as if they had a 
cold in the head. There is little question but that the surrounding 
valley was once a lake-bottom. Founded in 1574, the place was 
christened by a high-sounding Spanish name, which, as so often hap- 
pened in South America, failed to stick. It has a restful, summer- 
resort air, with birds singing in its shaded alamedas, reminding one 
faintly of Granada, with its sand and cactus and half-arid soil requir- 
ing irrigation. The little river Cocha wanders by the north and east 
sides of the town on its way to join the Mamore; the surrounding hills 
are less brown than the altiplanicie, half-clothed with trees and with 
patches of green running up the sides of the range. The showers 
were no highland drizzles, but perfect sheets of water for an hour or 
more — fine prospects for my continued travels at the end of wheel- 
going ! 

Yet it is a colorless place compared to La Paz. Adobe is the chief 
building material; there is no structure of great importance, though 
" La Compania " of the early Jesuits has the usual ornate fagade. Its 
houses are of the light yellow mud of the surrounding plain, less 
painted than those of the capital, and even the tile roofs are of so dull 
and dusty a red as scarcely to excite the eye. On a barren knoll at 
the back of the town is a ruined adobe bull-ring, once large and ornate, 
and still higher up, before the monument to the " Heroes of Cocha- 
bamba," the gaze stretches away across a yellowish land, flat as a 
sea, baking in the blazing sunshine. Costumes, too, show far less color 
than those of La Paz. La chola wears a similar hat, but it is flatter 
and therefore uglier, and she has neither the immaculateness, in- 
stinct for pleasing color combinations, nor the sprightliness of her 
Aymara cousin. Natives of pure Caucasian blood are so rare as to 
be almost conspicuous. Important commerce is largely in the hands 
of Germans ; even the English vice-consul was a Teuton. The munici- 
pal library bore a large sign announcing that it was open from 9 to 11, 
1 to 4, and 7 to 9. At nine-thirty the doddering old librarian ap- 
peared, and at 10:05, when he had finished reading the morning paper 
and smoking his cigarette, he put on his hat and remarked, " Nos 
vamos, senores," and go we did, sure enough. In the afternoon and 
evening he did not appear. Cochabamba has been called the paradise 
of priests. Fat, coarse-featured men of the cloth swarm, and the 
town is rated the most fanatical in Bolivia. As late as ten years ago 
a hogiiera was lighted in the central plaza to carry out an auto de fe 
against a Protestant who had dared to preach his doctrines in a pri- 

5i8 



ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

vate house, the materials for the inquisitorial bonfire being the holy 
books and furniture of the evangelist. The troops were called upon 
to interfere and prevented the consummation of the act, but they were 
not able to keep the " heretics " from being cruelly stoned by the popu- 
lace. The approach of the railway, however, the arrival of many 
gringos, and a now firmly established mission-school with a govern- 
ment subsidy is wearing down somewhat this medieval point of view. 

In a corner of the main plaza of Cochabamba, where the sunshine 
streaks upon it through the trees, was the " gringo bench," a rendez- 
vous at which there was always to be found at least an American and 
an odd Englishman or two, generally miners and even more generally 
penniless. For Bolivia had proved less golden than the rumors that 
had oozed forth from her interior, and there is no better climate than 
that of Cochabamba in which to sit waiting for whatever chooses 
to turn up next. At the time of my arrival the bench had three 
principal occupants. The most permanent fixture was " Old Man 
Simpson," over eighty, not merely a fellow-countryman, but originally 
from the same town in which I had spent my youth; indeed, he was 
still a subscriber to the weekly newspaper I had earned more than one 
school-day dollar folding and " carrying." A " Forty-niner " who 
had drifted from California to Chile, he had been in South America 
unbrokenly — though frequently " broke "— many more years than I 
had been on earth, his fortunes rising and falling with miner's luck 
and open-handedness, his " Spanish " still atrocious. Now he was so 
nearly blind that he could recognize us one from another only by our 
voices ; and every day he sat from sunrise to dusk, except for his 
" breakfast " and siesta from eleven to one, in the shaded corner of 
the plaza, a cud of coca-leaves in one cheek, his gnarled and leathery 
hands folded on the head of his chonta cane. All day long he would 
weave endless tales of the prospector's life, wandering disconnectedly 
over all the western side of the continent, as long as he could get a 
single gringo to sit and listen. When he could not, and was, or 
fancied himself, alone, he sat hour after hour motionless, murmuring 

each time the clock in the tower above struck, " Well, it 's 

o'clock," and relapsing again into silence. 

After Simpson came Sampson, an extraordinary cockney, re- 
sourceful, quick-witted, full of quaint sayings, of a strikingly per- 
sonal philosophy of life, so much of a " hustler " that his initiative 
often boiled over into audacity. He spoke fluently a colloquial Spanish 
and considerable Quichua, chewed coca incessantly, and came close to 

519 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

being the ugliest man I had ever set eyes upon. This last mentioned 
quality was enhanced by the slap-stick clown garb he wore, — faded 
overalls with a bib, some remnants of shoes here and there about his 
ham-like feet, a wooden neck-cloth a la Whitechapel, and an Indian 
felt hat on the back of his bullet head. His view of life he summed 
up — among friends — briefly with, " I am strictly honest ; I never 
tyke anything I can't reach." As to his resourcefulness: in this iden- 
tical garb he had gained the entree to the haughtiest class of natives, 
with whom outward appearances constitute some 99 percent., and 
had talked his hypnotic way into the confidence of a lawyer and ex- 
senator of Cochabamba to such an extent that the latter contemplated 
giving him charge of a large tract of land to plant with cotton. 

The third bencher, Tommy Cox, had been " down inside " with 
Sampson on some prospecting scheme that had failed. Originally from 
Toronto, he was in appearance and speech a " typical Englishman," a 
little sandy-haired fellow of twenty-five, the antithesis of his com- 
panion in initiative, of so dim a personality compared to Sampson 
that one barely noted his existence when the two were together. 

When I arrived in Cochabamba nothing was more certain than that 
I should continue my tramp down the Andes, through Sucre and 
Potosi, into the Argentine. But plans do not keep well in so warm a 
climate. I sat one day musing on the trip ahead of me, when Sampson 
cut in: 

" 'Ere ! If you 're looking for something new, why don't you shoot 
across country by Santa Cruz to the Paraguay river and down to 
Asuncion and B. A. ? Least I don't think it 's never been done by a 
white man alone and afoot." 

The idea sprouted. I suddenly discovered that I was weary of high 
altitudes and treeless punas, of the drear sameness of the Andes and 
the constant repetition of the serranos that inhabit them. To that 
moment I had, like most of the world, conceived of Bolivia as a lofty 
plateau, arid and cold ; whereas more than half of it is a vast, tropical 
lowland, spreading away from the slopes of the Andes to the borders 
of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, making it the third largest country 
of South America. There was, it seemed, a fourth way of entering 
or leaving this mediterranean land, and it was neither by way of 
Mollendo, Arica, nor Antof agasta ; but a route all but unknown to the 
world at large, yet followed by many of its imports and exports. 
The montana or yungas promised a new type of people, a new style 
of life; a knowledge of South America would be only half complete 

520 






ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

without including in my itinerary the immense hot-lands and river- 
webbed wilderness stretching eastward from the Andes. I wished 
some day to visit Paraguay, anyway; the distance to Puerto Suarez 
was evidently greater than to railhead in the Argentine — by striking 
an average of varying information, with the assistance of such maps 
as the local librarian gave me time to glance over, I came to the con- 
clusion that it was roughly 800 miles — but on the other hand much of 
this new route was floor-flat, and I had had my fill of climbing over 
such labyrinths of mountain ranges as lay to the south. True, in this 
season the region to the east would be wet and muddy, but with no 
bitter cold nights in prospect I could throw away much of my load, 
and at least there would be brilliant sunshine most of the time, which 
is half of life. Besides, is not the chief joy of travel the privilege of 
suddenly and unexpectedly smashing fixed plans, to replace them with 
something hitherto undreamed? 

To all these arguments there was added another still more potent. 
When I began to make inquiries, I learned that the proposed trip was 
" impossible." Several of my informants quoted recently received 
letters to prove it. The last hundred leagues would be entirely under 
water; the wild Indians of the Monte Grande would see to it that I 
should not get so far, to say nothing of miles of chest-deep mud-holes, 
" tigers," and swarms of even more savage insects, and many days 
without food or human habitation. That settled it. In Bogota the 
tramp down the Andes had been " impossible," but had long since lost 
completely 'that charming quality. I decided to strike eastward in 
quest of the Paraguay. 

" I wouldn't mind tackling it myself," sighed Tommy, when I men- 
tioned my decision to the benchers. " I 'm badly needed in B. A. But 
I 'm stony broke. Of course if I could find anyone who would take 
along a steamer-trunk-size man as excess baggage — " 

" If the senator does n't make up his wandering Bolivian mind soon, 
I '11 quit embellishing this plaza myself," put in the cockney, though 
there was a glint in his eye that suggested, long afterward, that he had 
meant the hint as a hoax, and considered the trip as impossible as did 
the rest of Cochabamba. 

Were I to have a companion, I should not have chosen Sampson. 
He was a man with far too much mind of his own to be good com- 
pany in an uncivilized wilderness. Tommy, diffident, unresourceful, 
totally lacking in initiative, without self-confidence, wholly innocent of 
Spanish, to all appearance tractable and harmless, was much to be 

521 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

preferred. Moreover, he was better looking. Though I was thinly 
furnished with bolivianos and the nearest possible source of supply was 
Buenos Aires, I concluded that the code of world-wanderers forbade 
me to leave Tommy to waste away on the " gringo bench," and we 
joined forces. He was to carry his proportionate share of such bag- 
gage as I could not throw away, including the tin kitchenette and the 
bottle of 40 percent, alcohol that went with it — if experience proved I 
could trust him with that — leaving me, thanks also to the offer of a 
fellow-countryman to carry the developing-tanks to Santa Cruz on his 
cargo-mule, only a moderate load. I should have bought a donkey, or 
another chusco, rather than turn ourselves into pack-animals, but for 
two reasons : first, such a purchase would have relieved me of most of 
the billetes I had left ; secondly, the fate of " Cleopatra " and " Chus- 
quito " caused me to doubt whether any four-footed animal could 
endure the journey. 

It was two months from the day I had walked into Cuzco that one 
of Cochabamba's toy trains carried us past adobe towns and mud 
fences, with dome-shaped huts that gave the scene an oriental touch, 
and set us down in Punata in time for dinner in the picantcria where 
Tommy had once before washed down a similar plate of stringy roast 
pork with a glass of chicha. Then we swung on our packs and 
struck eastward into the unknown. 

Beyond Arani next morning came the real parting of the ways. 
The trail that swung to the right along the base of the hills went on to 
Sucre and the silver mountain; that by which we zigzagged up the 
face of a stony range led across the continent. Here the mountains 
closed in, and the vast, fertile, yet dreary and desolate plain of Cocha- 
bamba, that had seemed to stretch out interminably in the brilliant sun- 
shine, disappeared at length below a swell of land and was lost for- 
ever behind us. 

For a week the going was not unlike that down the Andes, though 
it grew gradually lower as the endless ridges of the eastern slope 
calmed down slowly, like the waves of some tempestuous sea. It was 
only on the road that I began really to make the acquaintance of 
Tommy. In spite of his Canadian birth he dressed like a Liverpool 
dock-laborer, with a heavy cap, a kerchief about his neck, and a heavy 
winter vest — that is, " w'stc't " — which he could not be induced to 
shed, however hot the climate, though he readily enough removed his 
coat. He spoke with a strong " English accent," and a man following 
behind with a basket could have picked up enough H's to have started 

522 



ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

a supply^store of those scarce articles in Whitechapel itself. He had 
given Cochabamba ample opportunity to show its gratitude at his 
departure, but the fourteen bolivianos of his last eleemosynary glean- 
ings turned out to be barely sufficient to keep him in cigarettes on the 
journey. His share of the load he carried in the half of a hectic table- 
cloth, of mysterious origin, tied across his chest, as an Indian woman 
carries her latest offspring. His own possessions consisted wholly and 
exclusively of a large, sharp-pointed, proudly-scoured trowel; for 
Tommy was by profession a bricklayer and mason. This general con- 
venience, weapon, sign of caste, and hope of better days to come, he 
wore through the band of his trousers, as the Bolivian peon carries his 
long knife, and the services it performed were unlimited. I was never 
nearer throwing my kodak into a mud-hole than when it failed to 
catch Tommy solemnly eating soft-boiled eggs with the point of his 
faithful trowel. 

The hospitality of the Bolivian soon proved low, even in comparison 
with the rest of the Andes, and every meal and lodging cost us a 
struggle. At Pocona, for example, I ended a 36-mile walk down the 
nose of a range on which a coach road descended by never-ending S's 
to a narrow valley bottom below. Tommy had fallen behind, and I 
had begun to wonder whether he could endure the pace our scantiness 
of funds made necessary. As I debouched into the grass-grown plaza, 
I paused to ask a dim-minded person drowsing before one of the 
doors where one could find a night's lodging. He silently projected his 
lips toward a building before which stood the empty stage-coach. 
There a group of supercilious, unwashed cholos of varying stages of 
insobriety informed me, with an air that plainly said " We are pur- 
posely deceiving you," first, that there was no tambo in town, then 
that there was accommodation only for travelers " a bestia." 

" For horsemen only, eh ? " I cried, in the voice natural to an all- 
day fast. "Where does the corregidor live?" What are goberna- 
dores in Peru become corregidores in Bolivia. 

" Down the street," mouthed a half-drunken fellow, with a lazy 
toss of the head in no particular direction. 

I snatched a youth out of the group and pushed him before me. 
Some way down the foot-torturing cobbles he halted at the open door 
of the usual slatternly, earth-floored room, saying : 

" The corregidor lives here." 

" Go in and fetch him," I answered, blocking his attempted retreat. 
He called out two or three times in the singsong with which neighbors 

523 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

greet neighbors in the Andes, then obeyed my order to enter and sum- 
mon the " authority " — at least he disappeared inside the building. 
Some time later two chola girls appeared at the door to ask in pre- 
tended surprise what I desired. 

"Where is the corregidor?" 

" He is in the country. He does n't live here," they replied re- 
spectively in one breath, betraying themselves by their carelessness in 
not rehearsing the reply before appearing. 

" Where is the boy who brought me here ? " 

" Escapado — he escaped — through the back door." 

I had long ago learned this trick of local " authorities " in Andean 
villages of hiding away at the approach of a stranger bearing orders 
from the government, and the complicity of all the population in the 
concealment. But I had learned, also, one means of bringing him to 
light. I marched into the house and, throwing my pack on an adobe 
divan covered with blankets, announced that I should sleep there. 
The cholas would call the corregidor at once, they had called him, they 
could n't call him, he was coming in a minute, he did not live in town, 
and a dozen other falsehoods poured in a chaotic flood from their lips. 
For an hour I held to the divan. But as evening settled down, it be- 
came evident that the ruse of Peru would not work in Bolivia; that 
though I might sleep there by force, I should remain thirsty and 
hungry. I shouldered my bundle and hobbled back to the plaza. 
There ten centavos spent for chicha convinced the sceptical inhabitants 
that I was not penniless, and in time it paved the way to a request for 
food. 

" Como no?" came the mechanical answer, and a long time after 
dark a big bowl of broth, luke-warm of temperature but sizzling hot 
with aji, was followed by some hashed black chuno, or frozen potatoes, 
mixed with an egg, and some bran-like bread. 

" How much do I owe ? " I asked when I finished. 

" Pues — ah — sera setenta centavos." 

" Esta bien. And who is going to sleep on those beds?" I con- 
tinued, pointing to the long adobe divans, each with a roll of thin 
mattress and blankets, at either end of the room. 

" Nadie." 

" No one ? How much do you charge for a bed ? " 

" Un boliviano, no mas," replied the chola in that droning, soothing 
voice in which the Andean always names an exorbitant price which he 
knows the traveler cannot refuse to pay. " Voy a tender, no ? " 

524 



ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

" Yes, spread it out." 

I was stripping to crawl into the " star " bed of the tambo — in which 
only horsemen are accommodated — when there sounded at the door I 
had fastened ajar with a bench, the worn and humble voice of Tommy. 
Having fallen behind because of a half-sprained ankle, he had stum- 
bled on into town down that stony, looping descent which I had found 
bad enough even by day. Fortunately there was a bit of cold broth 
and some chuho left, after devouring which he turned in on the other 
divan. 

Next day we passed a wind-blown, rain-gashed plain, with a few 
huts on which to practice my neglected Quichua and, early in the 
afternoon, reached Totora, so named from a long rush which grows in 
swampy ground. It is the largest town between Cochabamba and 
Santa Cruz and capital of a province, with several thousand inhabitants. 
Set in a hollow of the treeless hills, it was dreary and colorless as a 
mining town, with breakneck cobbled streets, and a little tile-paved 
plaza surrounded by what Tommy called " drapers' shops," all with 
the selfsame display of bayeta and other crude-colored cloths. The 
vista of many a street was enlivened by swinging red signs, like 
Japanese or Chinese banners, above the doors where chicha was for 
sale. Far better, and almost given away in Colombia, this native drink 
had come to cost twice what a larger glass of beer would in the 
United States. In the upper corner of the plaza we spread ourselves 
at ease on a shaded bench. Around the pila in the center of the square 
a constant crowd carrying earthen jars fought for the two trickles of 
water. Behind us stood what dared to call itself the " Hotel Union," 
consisting of a billiard-table and an absent proprietor, who, according 
to the disinterested cholas, might be back during the evening to dis- 
cuss with us our offer to spend the night with him. The neighboring 
tambo was closed " because of a wedding in the family," so rare a 
ceremony in Bolivia that we had not the heart to complain. Tommy 
tired of sitting, and went to lie down in frank " hobo " fashion in the 
plaza band-stand. As dusk came on we made a round of the shops, 
warned that there would be none for some days ahead. We bought 
eggs, and blocks of crude sugar, now called empanada, coca to chew 
when thirsty, several loaves of the bran-like bread that weighed us 
down like grindstones, and some shelled peanuts which we found next 
day to be unroasted. Any chip of stone or scrap of iron served as 
weights in the shops, though some had brass cups full of shot, over 
which a paper was pasted by the rare government inspector, soon to 

525 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

" break itself " until he came again. That purchaser who got twelve 
ounces to his pound was as lucky as the one whose vara came any- 
where near being a yard long. A half-pound weight was commonly 
the heaviest on hand, and the old woman who sold us sugar poured 
that amount in with the weight in the other side of the scales, and so 
on until she had made up the unprecedented quantity we demanded. 

A telegraph wire strode bandy-legged over the hills with us on the 
twenty broken and panting miles to Duraznillo. Across a flanking 
valley the range was mottled with all colors from deep red to Nile- 
green, the depths of its gullies purple under dense cloud-shadows, 
while all the rest of the world lay in brilliant sunshine, and vast 
banks of snowy-white clouds took on fantastic shapes which the imag- 
ination could animate into all manner of strange beings, or people with 
innumerable plots and fairy-tales. One mighty descent brought us to 
a " river," but at the very moment we reached it, it turned suddenly 
muddy from rains somewhere in the hills above and spoiled our plan 
for a " bathe," as Tommy expressed it. In the dry, burning hills 
beyond, my companion went astray, but found himself again by fol- 
lowing my hob-nailed footsteps. He had so little initiative that he 
would not lead the way, and his favorite plan of plodding at my very 
heels having been vetoed, as he did not mix well with the landscape, 
he commonly trailed a half-mile behind, usually taking care not to lose 
sight of me. 

Duraznillo had a public " rest-house " that had once been an adobe 
chapel, but which was now as bare as a millionaire's room in heaven. 
I boiled oatmeal and eggs in the water Tommy brought from a stag- 
nant pool not far away, but waited in vain for the return of the only 
European-clad resident, who had volunteered to " arrange us."- As 
the shades of night spread, the beaten-mud floor looked harder and 
harder, and in nosing about we were astonished to discover several 
once-imported mattresses covering a pile of adobe bricks in the back 
corrector of the chief house of the village, apparently uninhabited. 
Still, it was possible that the local " authority " would in time come out 
of hiding, and we lolled patiently, if road-weary, in the moonlight. 

We had waited until — well, perhaps eight, though without a 
watch it seemed hours later, when patience ceased to be a virtue, and 
we slipped through a hole in the mud fence, each to embrace a mat- 
tress. It may be that a trap had been set for us. As we approached 
the wall again, an unusually large half-Indian, wrapped in a poncho, 
loomed up on the other side, and shouted in an authoritative voice: 

526 



ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

" What are you doing inside that fence ? " 

Now I do not like any man to address me in that tone, least of all 
a South American Indian. It is neither good training for his own 
primitive character nor advantageous to future gringo travelers. 

" Speaking to me, indio ? " I. demanded. 

" I am corregidor of Duraznillo, also guardian of this house." 

" Corregidor! Then you are the very fellow we have been looking 
for these last four hours. You will kindly lend us two mattresses to 
sleep on." 

" I will not lend you one mattress to sleep on. What are you 
doing?" 

Plainly he was of Aymara rather than meek Quichua blood. 

" And where have you been hiding yourself, sehor corregidor? We 
have a letter for you from the government." 

" Ugh ! " he snorted, with an effort at sarcasm. " Let 's see that 
letter from the government." 

" It is in my pack in the chapel." 

" Bring it over here." 

" Since when have caballeros run after Indians to show them gov- 
ernment orders ? Are you going to lend us two mattresses ? " 

" Not one ! " 

" Tommy, chuck them over." 

He did so with trembling hands, for something had given the dimin- 
utive bricklayer an extraordinary respect for " authorities." The 
corregidor followed at our heels, bellowing, as we carried our finds into 
the ex-chapel and spread them out. A stocky youth and a woman with 
a flickering candle appeared behind him in the doorway, and the 
Indian demanded my papers. 

" Can you read ? " I asked. 

" I can," he snarled ; which he could, to the extent of spelling out 
the order at about a line a minute. 

" Bien," he admitted at last, in a surly voice, " but you are to ask 
for things, not take them." 

" From a corregidor who hides himself?" 

" And the prefect orders that you be furnished what you need at a 
just price," he added triumphantly, ignoring my reply. 

"Exactly." 

" Then you will pay two bolivianos for each mattress." 

" Very well ; but you will first make out a receipt for that amount, 
that I may send it back to the prefect." 

527 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

It was not the first time I had played this unfailing card against an 
Andean '"authority" attempting extortion. He knew he was beaten; 
for though he could read, after a Bolivian fashion, he probably could 
not write, and certainly would not dare let such a document reach the 
prefect. Like a true Latin-American, however, he saved his face as 
long as possible: 

" Very well, give me some paper to write it on." 

" As corregidor, you should furnish your own paper. I have none." 

" Well, you may use one mattress, but not two," he growled. 

" You lose. In my country we are not accustomed to sleep two on 
the same mattress." 

A shiver of rage seemed to pass over him, while his Castilian pride 
struggled for expression behind his mask of Indian features. Then 
he faded away into the night and was heard no more, though I was not 
so certain of him as not to prop a heavy wooden beam against the 
door in such a way that an attempt to sneak in upon us during the 
night would quite likely have been followed in the morning by the 
intruder's funeral. 

Never-ending spiral descents, so steep we had to set the brakes con- 
stantly, making our thighs ache, brought us at last to a hot and stony 
river-bed across which a luke-warm, knee-deep " river " snaked its 
way incessantly. We stuffed leggings and Fusslappen into our bun- 
dles and walked all the rest of the day barefoot in our unlaced boots, 
crossing the stream perhaps a hundred times, and envying the hoof- 
soled natives as often as we paused to pull on our footwear. Tommy 
found it too much trouble to roll down his trousers after each cross- 
ing, and complained of sunburned legs for days to come. But at least 
the going was level. The stillness and lack of population recalled 
Jaen in the far north of Peru. For hours we tramped stonily between 
ever lower cactus-grown hills, only the mournful note of the jungle- 
dove breaking the silence. The first gnats and giant- jawed insects 
we were doomed to endure more and more as we advanced to the east- 
ward began to annoy us. As scrub trees thickened, bird life grew 
more prevalent. Bands of parrakeets screamed by, as always along 
these dry, tropical river-beds ; now and then a parrot or two, fore- 
runners of many to come, passed overhead. The rare huts squatting 
in scant patches of shade were now of mere open-work poles. To 
sleep in them was far less inviting than to lie on the ground under a 
shrub. 

But the Andes did not subside so easily. Next morning the trail 

528 




'Sandy" leading his train of carts loaded with construction material for the railroad to 

Cochabamba 




The "gringo bench' 



of Cochabamba, — left to right, "Old Man Simpson;" Tommy Cox; 
Sampson, the Cockney ; Owen, and Scribner 



ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

shook off the river and climbed wearily to a wind-swept puna, then 
dropped by a leg-straining bajada into another canon with a muddy, 
lukewarm brook, only to pant upward again to another summit. 
Several times each day we sweated to a hilltop and lay down in a cool 
breeze we should not often enjoy in the days to come. Range back of 
blue range spread away into ever-bluer, purple distance. The region 
recalled the Malay Peninsula — with all its romance rubbed off and 
even more inhospitable inhabitants tucked away in the undergrowth. 
Yet surely, if slowly, the Andes were flattening down, and each sum- 
mit was less lofty than the preceding. 

One afternoon passing arrieros told us that three of our paisanos 
were not far ahead. We increased our pace and strode at five, with 
thirty miles in our legs, into the miserable mud town of Chilon. In 
the corral and corredor back through one of the dismal dwellings we 
found, camped with their four mules, the American prospectors, Scrib- 
ner, Kimball, and Owen, who had burdened themselves with my 
developing-tank. We foraged together. These interior villages are 
less useful to the seeker after supplies than a lone country hut, for 
in them each native " passes the buck " by sending the inquirer on to 
someone else. The traveler who has lived for days chiefly on the 
anticipation of what he will eat in the town he has been assured is 
" provided with everything," is fortunate to collect the ingredients of 
even one real meal, and that only at the expense of wandering from 
door to door, like a Buddhist priest with his begging-bowl. Chilon 
was even more anemic and indifferent than usual. It is rated the most 
fever-stricken region of Bolivia, and the government has striven in 
vain to drive out the almost universal chucho by planting the eucalyp- 
tus and sending doctors to study its cause. The only water to be had 
was a yellow liquid mud dipped up in the back yard. Kimball pre- 
pared to cook in it some of the charqui he had bought at blockade 
prices, only to bring to light a swarm of maggots. A can of peaches 
from Chile — some time in the last century — cost two bolivianos ; 
four ounces of tea, a boliviano, a pound of sugar as much, and at that 
it was a coarse, dirty, stony stuff, so hard an ax was required to break 
it. One slattern a bit less sullen in aspect than the town in general 
asked if we " knew how " to eat mote and charol. We assured her we 
knew how to eat anything we could get our fingers on, and she set be- 
fore us a single plate of boiled shelled corn and little cubes of fried fat 
pork, which we ate with the spoons nature had provided us. In the 
entire town we gleaned two whole eggs. Most of the huts that dis- 

529 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

played them answered with that clumsy old Andean lie, " Son ajenos 
— They belong to some one else." A woman squatting behind one of 
the huts admitted she had eggs to sell, but said she did not feel like 
getting up to sell them. That was the attitude of all Chilon. It may 
be that the hookworm, as well as the chucho, was prevalent. 

When I awoke at dawn, Kimball, in retaliation for the state of the 
charqui, had already picked a chicken from one of the trees in the 
corral and managed to stuff it into his alforjas without a squawk. 
By the time we were off, it began to rain. A half-sand, half-mud road 
splashed and skated away through semi-tropical scrub woods, caking 
our feet v/ith glue-like mud, and soaking our garments from both inside 
and out. In spite of the rain the tropical heat weighed down upon 
us like water-logged blankets, and nowhere was there water to drink. 
Rarely among the spiny scrub trees we came upon a miserable hut of 
poles and sticks, in each of which lounged a dozen or so of the 
colorless, mongrel natives of the region. Rancho was being cooked 
in one such hovel, and though the householders showed no joy, or any 
other species of emotion, at our presence, when the meal was ready, a 
small wash-basin of rice, charqui, and pepper stew was set on the 
ground before us, and we were each silently handed a wooden spoon. 
There was, of course, no bread, but a gourd bowl of mote was added 
for our competition. This was one contest in which Tommy was 
easily my superior. The languid, fever-yellow chola would not ac- 
cept payment for the food, though she did so readily enough for the 
chica we had drunk, calling up to Tommy far-off memories of the 
land of " free lunch," so that several times during the blazing after- 
noon I heard his sheet-iron voice torturing the wilderness behind me 
with his own version of a one-time Broadway favorite : 

" Stake me back to New York town. . . ." 

Not two hours beyond we drifted into a saw-mill hacienda, and be- 
fore I knew it Tommy had told his tale so feelingly to the Italian 
owner, who had the misfortune to understand a little English, that we 
must go in and have a plate of cold spaghetti, imported to these wilds 
at nerve-shaking prices. Best of all, after nothing better than liquid 
mud for days, was several glasses of almost clear water. The Italian 
was bubbling over about some new invention by one of his countrymen 
that would forever abolish war. Half the world might be abolished 
without our hearing of it in these wilds. Before we left he inquired 
whether we had quinine, and forced upon Tommy a box of pills, with 
the urgent advice to take one every morning. I had already begun to 

530 



ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

dose myself daily, but was never able to convince my companion that 
ills might be forestalled far more easily than they could be ousted after 
they had staked their claims. 

It was December 21, the longest day of the year, and the sun was 
still high when we again overtook our " paisanos," camped this time 
along a brick-floored corredor under the projecting eaves of a large 
tile-roofed hacienda-house, among scrub trees and scattered huts to the 
right of the trail. The building was imposing for the region, for the 
owner held title to a vast tract and many cattle. I recalled the plump 
hospitality of many a similar hacendado of Peru, but was quickly 
reminded that we were in Bolivia. Our " paisanos " had already 
eaten. Having come on foot, Tommy and I were too low caste to be 
invited into the brick- floored dining-room with the swarming family. 
After much reconnoitering I found a hut where a lean chicken could 
be bought at a high price, and the sefiora of the hacienda grudgingly 
agreed to have her servants cook it. Here, too, the only water was a 
thick yellow liquid flowing behind the house and common to all its 
animals. At sight of it we had abandoned our plan to bathe, yet we 
must drink it and cook in it. The apathy of life in these parts is ex- 
emplified by the fact that an hacendado of comparative wealth will 
drink mud all his life, rather than dig a well. 

Long after dark an unwashed chola came waddling into the corre- 
dor with a single bowl of charqui stew and two wooden spoons. 
Tommy fell upon this gratefully, as he would have upon a bone dis- 
carded by a dog. Personally I was not pleased with the metamorpho- 
sis the fowl had undergone, and calling out the haughty hacendado, I 
thrust a handful of bills toward him, asking if he could not sell us 
something fit to eat, even if he did want the chicken for himself. The 
hint caused him to turn a. livid green. These landowners of the in- 
terior, too " proud " to sell food to travelers, are yet too tight-fisted to 
give it away; and a lifetime on their own broad, if worthless, acres, 
with only a few cringing Indians about them, lording it over even their 
own women, causes them to consider themselves vastly superior to all 
mankind, and to treat travelers accordingly. So thoroughly had I 
ruffled his pomposity that the fellow, visibly shaking with anger, went 
to sit under a scraggly tree in the grassless sand before the house 
and rage in silence, then took to pacing back and forth, in and out of 
the building, and kept it up until well into the morning. He might 
have vented his rage more effectually, for law has but slight foothold 
in these wild regions, but for the half-dozen revolvers, rifles, and pis- 

53i 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

tols lying about us in the corredor. Meanwhile a servant brought my 
chicken in a pot, and though it was tougher than life in Bolivia, we 
drank the broth and hung the remnants of the fowl to a rafter above 
our heads, out of reach of dogs, Indians, or ants. 

It rained most of the night, and the wood we could find in the chill 
slate-tinted dawn was so wet that it was a good hour before we boiled 
tea and rice in the yellow mud — and coaxed Tommy to get up in time 
to eat. Barely two hundred yards beyond, we came to the muddy 
river, must unshoe the feet we had just carefully shod for the day, 
and had a provoking task dressing them again on the mud-reeking 
further bank. Tommy went to hunt cigarettes — which are to be had 
in these parts only by inquiring at each hut until one has found some 
old woman who has inadvertently rolled a dozen or two beyond her 
own consumption — and it was hours later that he overtook me. We 
undulated on over half-sandy country, a thorn-tree desert without 
sight or sound of human life, grown with thousands of immense cac- 
tus trees of the pipe-organ species from which fell myriads of tunas, 
an " apple " Tommy called it, the outer spines of which fall off when 
ripe, the juicy interior, full of tiny black seeds, with mildly the taste 
of strawberries, effective at least in quenching the thirst. 

At i. scattered cluster of huts called Mataral we found a group of 
drunken Indians, male and female, celebrating the customary wake in 
and about a hut where a baby had died. The corpse of the angelito 
lay pale-yellow and half naked on a bare, home-made table, a lighted 
candle on either side of its head, its nostrils stuffed with cotton, and 
already beginning to make its presence known to another of the five 
senses, while all about the premises rolled maudlin, fishy-eyed half- 
breeds, only too glad of any excuse for consuming gallons of overripe 
chicha. Outside, a half-sober cholo was piecing a coffin together from 
the odds and ends of boxes that had once held foreign imports. The 
priest's assurance that infants, properly baptized, go directly to heaven 
makes such a death the cause almost for rejoicing among the ignorant 
population of Bolivia, even if it leads to nothing worse than passive 
infanticide. 

Frequent ridges and a stream that forced us to unshoe and shoe a 
score of times, reddening our legs where our leggings should have 
been, decidedly reduced our pace. Not without surprise, therefore, 
did I sight at dusk, among the trees on a low bluff across a nearly 
waterless river-bed, a village of moderate size, thirty miles from where 
we had started in the morning. It was Pampa Grande. My f ellow- 

532 



ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

countrymen had already commandeered a mud room on a corner of the 
second street, and chucked their possessions pell-mell into it. Among 
the luxuries the place offered was bread, soggy and gritty, dark of 
complexion as the inhabitants, but bread for all that. While we were 
swallowing chunks of this and of empanada, some one discovered that 
it was Christmas Eve. A celebration was imperative. Kimball dug 
up an ancient fife from his pack, I still possessed a battered mouth- 
organ, and all but Owen, who had none, lent their voices to the lusty, 
if not musical, carols that astonished the apathetic hamlet so thor- 
oughly that a few found energy to gather in a drooping group in the 
noiseless street outside. We ended with our patriotic anthem, in the 
midst of which Kimball's fife suddenly broke off its wail long enough 
for him to assure Tommy: 

" Here, young feller, don't get it into your nut that 's ' Gawd save 
no King ' we 're treatin' these greasers to ! " 

The prospectors pushed on in the morning, but finding ourselves 
a day ahead of our schedule, and that we could still reach Santa Cruz 
before the end of the year, we decided to spend Christmas in Pampa 
Grande. It was ideal Christmas weather. The village stands on the 
eighteenth parallel, at an altitude of some 4000 feet, giving it a soft 
midsummer air, with a caressing breeze and a most restful atmos- 
phere. Life had slowed down to a snail's pace. The mud-housed 
inhabitants were too indolent to make a noise or disturbance; even 
our next-door neighbors were too apathetic to come and satisfy their 
curiosity by staring at us. Lying on the adobe couch under the eaves, 
we could let: our eyes roam lazily over the surrounding sandy, scrub- 
wooded country of unabrupt hills, utterly silent but for the occasional 
faint note of the mourning jungle-dove. 

But the all-important question was Christmas dinner. The boyish 
corregidor was duly impressed by my papers, and assured me we could 
have " anything we might desire." I took him at his word and handed 
over a boliviano with a request for eggs. He called in a sandaled youth 
and sent him away with orders to round up a basketful. Then he 
wandered home. After a time the youth came shuffling back to say 
he could not find a single egg; and thrust the coin toward me. I was 
too experienced an Andean traveler to accept it and thus absolve the 
" authorities " of any further aid. Blocked in his turn, the corregidor 
came again in person to suggest a chicken at a boliviano. My extrava- 
gance in accepting this offer startled him, but he dropped the coin 
deftly into my hand and hurried languidly off, ostensibly to look for 

533 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the fowl, really to sneak home by a roundabout route. He could 
not be blamed much for such conduct. Appointed by force and obliged 
to serve without emoluments, the rural " authority " lives between two 
millstones, the lower composed of his fellow-townsmen and lifelong 
friends, with whom he must continue his existence, a far more tangible 
and permanent reality than the somewhat nebulous government that 
furnishes travelers with imperative orders from far-off La Paz or Co- 
chabamba. 

But a Christmas dinner is nothing to grow sentimental or sympa- 
thetic about. When I had loafed and drowsed and read an hour or 
more longer, I wandered a few yards up the sandy street to the cor- 
regidor's hut. 

" No," he mourned regretfully from his hammock, " I have not been 
able to find a chicken. Nobody wants to sell." 

" But, senor corregidor," I protested, " we have n't a thing with 
which to make dinner — Christmas dinner, and the Minister of the 
Interior in La Paz told me — " 

The official name brought him slowly from the hammock to his 
feet, a worried look on his face. 

" Very well," he sighed, " then we will make you an almuerzo here 
in my house, which is your own." 

" Not at all, senor ; we would not dream of troubling you. But if 
you have wherewith to make an almuerzo, let us have the ingredients 
and we will cook them to suit ourselves." 

" Well, there is charqui — " 

" Don't mention it. We don't want to insult our stomachs, even on 
Christmas. I was speaking of food." 

" Well, there is a house down at the edge of the river where they 
have killed a beef — " 

" Yes, three days ago ; and the lump of it my compatriots bought 
this morning all but lifted the roof off our hut. A slice carved out 
of the middle of it was grass-green. The yellow dog that picked up 
both chunks of it when we threw it into the street may have had the 
Christmas dinner of his life, but he is not likely to see another." 

" Ay, Dios, senor, then there is nothing else." 

" Now, for the good of Pampa Grande, I advise you ! There are 
plenty of chickens in town." 

" The people will not sell. The only way is for you to go out and 
shoot one with your revolver." 

534 



ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

" I never risk my aim on anything smaller than a bullock. Car- 
tridges are expensive in the wilds of Bolivia." 

Such gringo persistency was annoying. Native travelers needed 
only to be told the same lie two or three times before they left him in 
peace to drowse in his hammock. With a badly concealed sigh he 
wandered into the street, and led the way across the noiseless sanded 
plaza to the house of his friend the alcalde. The two conferred to- 
gether and finally sent out a cholo with orders to run down a chicken 
— " anybody's at all." The emissary returned by and by to report 
that he could not find one. The pair looked at me as much as to say, 
" There, you see the last hope has failed." I ignored the hint. In 
despair they called in another cholo and with a mumbled order handed 
him a shotgun. A long time later a report was heard some distance 
off. The two officials shivered. By and by the cholo returned with 
the shotgun and announced that " it was badly loaded." He said 
nothing about the aiming. The officials looked at me imploringly. I 
remained like a statue of patience seated on a cactus. At last the 
alcalde, with the air of a member of a suicide club who has drawn the 
black bean, snatched up the gun and, calling upon the cholo to follow, 
disappeared into the sunshine. For a time only the chirp of an insect 
in the thatch above sounded. Then a shot was heard, and a moment 
later the alcalde dodged into the room like a man pursued by bandits, 
thrust the weapon quickly under a reed mat, and assumed his seat 
and his most innocent air. Legally he might shoot all his neighbors' 
chickens on government order; practically he was not anxious to be 
seen at it. The corregidor looked sorrowfully but appealingly up at 
him. His voice was a weak whisper : 

" Yes, we got him. It was Don Panchito's red one. No, the pul- 
let. No, none of the family seemed to see me, but quien sabe ? " 

For a considerable time more nothing happened. I began to wonder 
if this, too, had been a well-acted ruse. Now and then the alcalde 
or the corregidor rose and peered anxiously down the street through 
the crack of the door. Whenever the patter of footsteps sounded out- 
side, the pair grew stiff with misgiving. 

Then suddenly in burst the cholo, carrying under his poncho the 
polio, already relieved of its feathers, thus accounting for the last 
delay. It was a tolerably plump bird, and the corregidor thought fifty 
centavos would be a just price. He would give it to Don Panchito 
to-morrow, when his wrath had cooled. I paid it and hurried home. 

535 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

There followed an hour's wandering and pleading, all of which I must 
do in person, since Tommy spoke no Spanish, and several more appeals 
to the corregidor before I got lard, rice, tiny potatoes at ten cents a 
pound, as well as an unexpected bowl of what purported to be stewed 
peaches. The pot the corregidor could lend us was large enough for 
an army. Tommy, who had once been second 'cook on board ship — 
after they had found him — was appointed fireman and general assist- 
ant, and soon had the three-stone fagot cook-stove out under the back 
porch roaring. Then with plantains fried in lard and — But why 
enumerate? By the time we had fed the ragamuffins at the back 
door and hung the not yet empty kettle on the top of a hammock-post, 
even Tommy's inclination to make tea had evaporated. It may not 
have been a genuine Christmas dinner. Pumpkin pie, for instance, 
was painfully conspicuous by its absence. But it produced the same 
effect. While Tommy stretched out on a mud divan, I spread my 
poncho on the sand under a tree in the back yard, where the gusts 
of breeze came often enough to lull me quickly into a siesta. 

I had barely fallen asleep when the chicken-shooter came to " give 
me information about the town," and I must get up and go back to 
the room with him. There he picked up the scattered pages of Ibafiez' 
" Flor de Mayo " I had discarded as I read, then clawed out my copy 
of a Cochabamba newspaper. When he had perused that he took 
to fingering my note-book, which fortunately he could not read, until 
at last in disgust I spread my poncho again on the brick floor and was 
soon sound asleep. When I woke again at sunset both informant 
and information had faded away. I went out on the porch to write, 
and a neighbor came to pull the note-book out of my hands and sol- 
emnly " read " it, quite oblivious in his illiteracy to the fact that there 
was hardly a word of Spanish in it, besides being legible only to the 
elect. Then he must inspect my fountain-pen and learn all its inner 
secrets. When I recovered it and continued writing with what ink 
was not smeared over his person, he thrust his nose between the 
pages, inquiring: 

" Are you noting all the inhabitants of Pampa Grande ? " 

" No." 

" Ah, only the notable ones, then ? " 

" Alas, no ; you see I have only a moderate-sized note-book." 

In the cool of evening the corregidor came again to share his 
troubles with me, bewailing the fact that Pampa Grande no longer 

536 




The home and family of the alcalde who could not read 




Our impromptu celebration of Christmas Eve in Pampa Grande 



ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

had a Christmas celebration, because they had no cura. By the same 
token there was no longer a public market on Sundays and feast-days, 
" for the Indians only come to town to sell if there is a church fiesta 
at which they can drink chicha." 

" God save us," he sighed as he rose to leave, " for want of a priest 
we are all turning Protestants ! " 

I respread my " bed " early. But the aftermath of the Christmas 
dinner had not yet run its course. Some time far into night I was 
for a long time half-conscious of some hubbub, and at last woke en- 
tirely. On his piece of blanket on the floor Tommy was rolling from 
side to side, in one hand his precious trowel, which he was beating on 
the flaggings until it rang again, while shouting at the top of his voice : 

" Mortar ! Mortar ! How in can I lay bricks if you don't keep 

me in mortar ? " 

All next day he dragged far behind in the twenty-five miles to 
Samaipata, second largest town of this leg of the journey. Ahead of 
us was a five-days' tramp without the suggestion of a village, and we 
were forced to weigh ourselves down under such supplies as we could 
purchase. Some two hours beyond Samaipata, 3000 feet or more 
above the road, up the range on the right, stands what the natives of 
the region call " El Fuerte." Here, in a splendid strategic position, 
covering the flat top of an entire hill, were and still are extensive 
terraces and the mostly fallen remains of what must have been im- 
portant buildings, now overgrown with brush, though there are few or 
no real trees. Scattered about this cold and barren plateau, some 
10,000 feet above sea-level, are many carved seats, similar to those of 
Cuzco and vicinity, and figures cut in sandstone, among which jaguars, 
ostriches, and other fauna of the Andes can still be distinguished, 
though many are time- and weather-worn beyond identification. 
Practical miners who have visited the spot report the existence of ore- 
washing apparatus of hewn stone. According to tradition the Incas 
had here their easternmost stronghold, built by Yupanqui, the emperor 
who aspired to conquer the hated huara-ni, the " breechless " tribes of 
the tropical lowlands. At present " ElTuerte " is utterly uninhabited. 
For many years one aged Indian lived here, long reputed to be more 
than a century old. The people of the region called him " the Inca " 
and credited him with supernatural powers and untold wealth. The 
usual rumors of hidden gold and jewels, and of subterranean passages 
from temple to treasure-house, hover about the place. So far as is 

537 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

known the site has never been visited, or at least explored, by arch- 
eologists, to whom it might bring rewards not inferior to those of 
Machu Picchu. 

As the Andes flattened down, ever slowly and as if under protest, 
the population showed more African blood; and if the people did not 
grow more friendly, at least they were less incommunicative than 
those of the highlands. The women took to smoking, a custom almost 
unknown to the sex on the altiplanicie, until it become quite the fash- 
ion. Ouichua had finally died out near Totora. Real tropical heat, 
such as I had all but forgotten the existence of, weighed down upon 
us, though it did not induce Tommy to be seen without his winter 
vest. We moved forward steadily, but no longer pushed the pace ; 
the tropics is no place for that. Wandering comfortably along sandy 
trails through half-woods, we came now and then upon a cluster of 
weather-blackened wooden crosses tied together with vines, with 
rudely carved and misspelled lettering, such as: 

" Rogad adios por el alma de Pablo Morales 
Fallesio 22 jullo de 191 1." 

The alcalde of Monos, which consisted of a single hut at the top of 
a stiff zigzag, had already held that honor for years, in spite of his 
protests. When I handed him the order from his chief in Samaipata, 
he returned it, asking me to read it aloud, as he could not. I did 
so fairly, without taking advantage of the occasion to include a com- 
mand from the president of the republic for him to stand on his head, 
and, duly impressed, he spread a sun-dried cowhide for us on the 
unlevelled earth floor of his wall-less lean-to, and set his women to 
preparing us a caldo, of which we furnished the rice and they the fire, 
labor, and a bit of what looked and tasted like grass. Food had grown 
so tasteless that we had to force it down like medicine, simply because 
we needed the strength. To me fell the task of making the family 
understand why we should wish to eat again in the morning, before we 
started. 

A couple of hours beyond, I came upon Tommy, who for once had 
forged ahead, seated beside the trail and overcome with sadness. 
With reason, as the Spaniard says. Far away across the bottomless 
wooded hole in the earth at our feet rose a sharp range with red rock 
cliffs up which the trail climbed to the very gates of heaven — which 
we should find locked no doubt when we arrived. As Tommy put it, 

538 



ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

" I think they must have to take part of that hill away when the moon 
comes over." We slept that night higher than Samaipata. But this 
was the last surge of the Andean billows. Next morning we came 
out on a wonderful vista of tropical South America, an unbroken sea 
of green, rolling and more hilly than I had imagined it, spreading away 
in all directions into the purple haze of vast distances. We had come 
at last to the end of the Andes. 

Now and then thereafter came a short descent, but no more rises, 
and we were soon in real jungle, with palm-trees of many species. 
Banana plants appeared ; and insects bit us from hair to ankles. Upon 
us came that care-free languor of the tropics, and for the first time I 
realized the strain of living and tramping two or three miles aloft. 
Dense vegetation crowded the trail, now heavy in sand in which the 
constant slap of our feet grew monotonous, close on either hand. 
Night had no terrors now, for we could lie down anywhere. Fruit 
of many kinds grew, — plantains, bananas, melons, oranges green in 
color, papayas, — but was rarely for sale. The rare inhabitants had a 
more kindly air, addressing us as " Che " — " Hola, che gringo ! " — 
the familiar and affectionate term, evidently from the Guarani for 
" Look ! " or " Listen ! ", which we were to hear often from now on 
clear into the Argentine, but they were still not noted for unselfishness. 
A belligerent attitude might have won more, but that we had left 
behind with the bleak highlands. Besides, through it all Tommy 
would have hung on my coat-tail, had I worn one, shuddering in his 
English, laboring-class voice, " Don't ! Don't tyke it ! The police ! " 

— and once anything had been obtained, he would have made away 
with it so swiftly that I should have caught little more than its vagrant 
aroma. The desire for sweets was alarming. Indeed, it was a crav- 
ing for food, rather than hunger, that troubled us. We ate great 
chunks of empanisado, and an hour after the best meal we should have 
jumped to accept an invitation to a fifteen-course dinner. 

We were following now the course of the little, all but waterless, 
Piray, some day to join the Mamore and the Amazon. There were 
many pack-trains of donkeys and mules going and coming. Thunder 
grumbled frequently far off to the east. Toward sunset we came 
upon an hacienda-house before which hung a bullock on a clothes-line 

— in the process of being charquied, and already as succulent as the 
sole of an old boot. The haughty hacendado grudgingly sold us 
chunks of the already-too-long-dead animal at the breath-taking price 
of fifty centavos a pound, and steeping tea in water so thick it could 

539 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

all but stand alone, we cut off slabs of the meat and thrust them into 
the fire on the ends of sticks, to eat it half-raw and unaccompanied, 
like gauchos of the pampas. 

About the house was thick grass, an unusual feature in South Amer- 
ica, for ordinarily either the altitude is too great for it, or the jungle 
so thick it cannot grow in the constant shade. The hacendado gave us 
permission to lie anywhere in the yard, with a graciousness that im- 
plied we might also eat the longest grass if we chose. All the corrals 
in the neighborhood were filled with donkey- and mule-trains, with 
arrieros speaking both Spanish and the Quichua of the highlands, on 
the way to or from Santa Cruz with cargoes of alcohol, hides, and 
tobacco coming out and foreign merchandise going in. For a long 
time we sat in the velvety air of a jungle evening, listening to the 
singing of tree-toads and crickets and the occasional faint tinkle 
of a grazing lead-mule's bell, with now and then the sharp, excited 
chorus of birds, — all interwoven with the wind-borne voices of 
the arrieros. Then I picked a spot, as apt to be free from snakes, 
on the clipped grass a few yards from the house, and lay down on my 
rubber poncho. The soft breeze soon lulled me to sleep, in spite of 
the itching of countless insect-bites. I had not slept long probably, 
when I was awakened by rain striking me in the face. It would not 
last long, I fancied. I pulled the poncho over me and let it rain. 
It did. Quickly it increased to a hollow roar ; trickles of water began 
to tickle me along the ribs. Evidently I had picked a slight slope, for 
the water was soon pouring in upon me in streams. I caught up my 
scattered belongings and dashed for the house, the wet poncho lap- 
ping up all the mud in the vicinity, and some of my effects dropping 
at each step, forcing me to await the next flash of lightning to find 
them. Under the corredor roof there was barely room to roll up 
beside Tommy on the earth floor, trampled hard as an iron casting, 
and for an hour there roared such a tropical deluge as I had never 
known in the western hemisphere. 

The Piray, now a wide, raging river of red mud, forced us to strip 
to the waist, and even then splashed us redly far higher as we breasted 
the powerful current. All day we plowed through dense forest, wet 
and soggy, singing with insect life, a roaring tropical shower bursting 
upon us now and then, after each of which the red sun blazed out 
through the thick, humid air. With dusk we waded heavy-kneed into 
La Guardia, sticky and sweated as the dweller in the tropics must 
always be who cannot spend the day in a hammock ; fighting swarms 

540 



ON FOOT ACROSS TROPICAL BOLIVIA 

of gnats while we waited patiently for the promised antidote for our 
raging appetites. Twice during the day we had climbed padlocked 
bars across the trail. I had fancied them toll-gates, but found they 
were aduanillas, little custom-houses for the collection of duty on 
goods entering, or produce leaving the department of Santa Cruz. 
Each hide exported paid about 65 cents; the flour that had come all 
the way from Tacoma, Washington, by ship, train, and mule had added 
to its already exorbitant price a high departmental duty. No wonder 
chunks of boiled yuca commonly took the place of bread. 

Beyond La Guardia the country was more open, the forest at times 
giving place to half-meadows, with single trees and grazing cattle, 
across which drifted a breeze that tempered the midsummer heat. 
The way lay so straight across the floor-flat country that the line of 
telegraph poles beside it looked like a single pole standing forth against 
the horizon. There were many huts now, roofed and sometimes 
entirely made of palm branches. Warm, muddy water was our only 
drink, for we had descended so low that the inhabitants were too lazy 
even to make chicha. Once we got a watermelon, which are small 
here and far from being on ice. In passing another hut I was startled 
by a cry of " Se vende pan," and went in to pay two females, whose 
faces were a patchwork of gnat-bites, an astounding price for some 
tiny, soggy biscuits. Ponderous ox-carts with solid wooden wheels 
crawled by noiselessly in the deep sand behind three and even four 
pairs of drowsy oxen. Everything, even the breeze, moved now with 
the leisureliness of the tropics. The jungle ahead was so flat and 
green, so banked by clouds, that one had the feeling that the sea was 
soon to open out beyond. We loafed languidly on, certain that our 
goal was near, yet though there were other evidences that we were 
approaching a city, there were no more visible signs of it than in 
approaching Port Said from the sea. 

At last, so gradually that we were some time in distinguishing it 
from a tree-top, a dull-colored church-tower grew up in line with the 
vista of telegraph-poles. We drifted inertly into a sand-paved, silent, 
tropical city street, past rows of languid stares, and on the last after- 
noon of the year, with Cochabamba 335 miles behind us, sat down 
dripping, a week's lack of shave veiling our sun-toasted features, in 
the central plaza of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. 

Tommy had heard so many stories of the generosity of the crucefios 
that he was astonished to have reached the center of town without be- 
ing invited from some doorway to come in and make his home there as 

54i 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

long as he chose. This was doubly annoying, since rumor had it that 
white men were so in favor with the gentler sex that a sandy-haired 
one as handsome as Tommy fancied himself to be was in danger of 
being damaged by the feminine rush his appearance was sure to pre- 
cipitate. After a time he rose to carry his perplexity back to where 
we had seen the British vice-consular shield covering the front of a 
house. When I met him again he had told his sad tale so effectively 
that he had been " put up " at both hotels by as many compatriots and 
was eating regularly at each, though taking care not to let his right 
hand know what the left was carrying to his mouth. After dark, in a 
humid night made barely visible by a few candle street-lamps, I 
splashed out to the hut of Manuel Abasto in the outskirts, to sleep 
under the trees in the canvas-roofed hammock of one of the American 
prospectors, the legitimate occupant being engaged in the role of Don 
Juan in the city. The hut was crowded with peons already half drunk, 
languidly fingering several guitars and now and then raising mournful 
voices in some amorous ballad. At midnight church-bells rang, and 
one distant whistle blew weakly to greet the incoming year, but the 
music of the tropical rain on the canvas over my head soon lulled me 
to sleep again. 



54^ 



CHAPTER XX 

LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

SANTA CRUZ DE LA SIERRA, capital of all the vast depart- 
ment of eastern Bolivia, owes its fame largely to its isolation. 
Like those eminent men of many secluded corners of South 
America, it is important only because of the exceeding unimportance 
of its neighbors. The only tropical city of Bolivia, it stands some 
1500 feet above sea-level on the 18th meridian, very near the geo- 
graphical center of the republic, so far from the outside world that 
mail deposited on January 7th reached New York on March nth. 
Of its 19,000 inhabitants, 11,000 are female. The emporium and dis- 
tributing point of all this region and of the rubber districts of the Beni, 
its commerce is chiefly in the hands of Germans, though the two houses 
that all but monopolize the trade pose as Belgian, with headquarters 
in Antwerp. There are few Bolivian, and only three crucefio houses 
of importance, and these for the most part buy of German wholesalers 
in Cochabamba. Three or four native families have as much as 
$150,000, a fortune by crucefio standards, won from rubber, or from 
cattle ranches roundabout the city. Yet there is much primitive 
barter, even in the town, — an ox for a load of firewood, and the like, 
with no money concerned in the transaction. Santa Cruz is the place 
of birth of those famous Suarez brothers who are kings of the rubber 
districts of the Amazon. 

It is a city of silence. Spreading over a dead-flat, half -sandy, jun- 
gled plain, its right-angled streets are deep in reddish sand in which 
not only its shod feet — by no means in the majority, though the upper 
class is almost foppish in dress — but even the solid wooden wheels of 
its clumsy ox-carts make not a sound. There is no modern industry 
to lend its strident voice, though the town boasts three " steam es- 
tablishments " for the making of ice, the grinding of maize, and the 
sawing of lumber, and every street fades away at either end into the 
whispering jungle. Narrow sidewalks of porous red bricks, roofed 
by the wide overhanging eaves of the houses, often upheld by pillars 
or poles, line most of the streets. But these are by no means continu- 

543 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

ous, and being commonly high above the street level and often taken 
up entirely, especially of an evening, by the families, who consider 
this their veranda rather than the pedestrian's right of way, the latter 
generally finds it easier to plod through the sand of the street itself. 
In the rainy season, which begins with the new year and lasts through 
April, there are many muddy pools and ponds in the outskirts, along 
the edges of some of which the streets crawl by on long heaps of the 
skulls of cattle, bleached snow-white by the sun, and the larger of 
which, almost lakes, somehow carried the mind back to Kandy, Ceylon. 
Frequently the streets in the center of town are flooded for an hour or 
more, until the thirsty sand has drunk up a tropical deluge. For 
these eventualities Santa Cruz has a system of its own. At each 
corner four rows of atoquines, weather-blackened piles of a kind of 
mahogany, protrude a foot or more above the sand; and along these 
stepping-stones the minority passes dry-shod from one roofed sidewalk 
to another. 

The houses, usually of a single story, their tile roofs bleached 
yellowish by the tropical sun, present a large room, wide open by 
day on the porch sidewalk, and rather bare in appearance in spite of 
a forest of frail cane chairs, black in color. From the once white- 
washed adobe walls protrude several pairs of hooks on each of 
which hangs, except during the hour of siesta, a rolled-up hammock. 
On or near the floor sits a little hand sewing-machine, the exotic 
whirr of which sounds now and then; and just inside the door are 
usually a few shallow tubs, like small dugout canoes, holding tropical 
fruits, soggy bread cakes, and sugar in all its stages ; for many, even 
of the " best families," patch out their livelihood with a bit of amateur 
shopkeeping. Through this main room, parlor, and chief pride of 
each family, past which one cannot walk without glancing in upon 
the household, a back door gives a glimpse of the patio, a pretty 
garden hidden away after the Moorish fashion — strange that the 
Arab influence should have reached even this far-distant heart of 
South America — airy and bright and large, for space is not lacking 
in Santa Cruz, often almost an orchard and blooming with flowers 
of many colors. On this open several smaller rooms which, being 
out of sight of the public, are often far less attractive than the parlor. 

In the outside world the climate of Santa Cruz is reputed obnoxious 
to whites ; about its name hover those legends, common also to India, 
of Europeans being worn to fever-yellow wrecks. As a matter of 
fact, the temperature does not rise higher than in southern Canada 

544 




A street of Santa Cruz de la Sierra after a shower, showing the atoquines, or projecting 
spiles by which pedestrians cross from one roofed sidewalk to another 




Conscripts of the Bolivian army practicing their first manoeuvers in the central plaza of 

Santa Cruz. All who have reached the age of nineteen during the past year are 

obliged to report at the capital of their province on New Year's Day 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

in July, and a cool breeze sweeps almost continually across the pampas 
about it. Mosquitos are rare, fever all but unknown. It is not loss 
of health, but his energetic view of life which the Caucasian im- 
migrant risks. Especially during this hottest season of January the 
heat was humid and heavy, and I found myself falling quickly into 
the local mood of contentment just to lie in a hammock and let the 
world drift on without me. It took an unusual length of time to 
make up my mind to do anything, and then required more will-power 
than usual to force myself to get up and do it, particularly to keep on 
doing it until it was finished. But it is perhaps as largely due to 
environment as to the climate that Santa Cruz is visibly lazy. The 
region roundabout is so fertile that almost every staple except wheat 
and potatoes grow, and the slightest exertion earns sustenance. There 
are sugar plantations and sugar- and alcohol-producing establishments 
scattered here and there; the province of Sara to the north supplies 
food not only to the city but to the rubber districts as far away as the 
Acre; coffee, rice, and tobacco can be produced in abundance; hides 
already constitute an important export; the region to the west is re- 
puted rich in oil. Yet Santa Cruz makes small use of her possibilities, 
languidly waiting for the arrival of a railroad and the influx of foreign 
capital to develop them. 

The rumors that seep up out of Santa Cruz of her beautiful pure- 
white types are largely of artificial propagation. It is true that she 
has a larger percentage of Spanish blood than any other city of 
Bolivia, but this is rarely found in its unadulterated form. Some 
negro and considerable Indian ancestry has left its mark, and while 
there is not a full-blooded African, or perhaps a full Indian, in town, 
and Spanish is the universal, if slovenly, tongue, genuine white natives 
are few in number. As to the beautiful girls and women of popular 
fancy, they do exist, but certainly in no larger proportion than pearls 
in oysters. The overwhelming majority are coarse-featured, with 
heavy noses and sensual lips, crumbling teeth that hint at degeneration, 
and little attractiveness beyond the quick-fading physical one of youth. 

Some cynic has said that a wall set about Santa Cruz de la Sierra 
would enclose the largest house of ill-fame on earth. So broad a 
statement is unkind. Yet not merely are the majority of crucenos 
born out of wedlock — that much can be said of all Bolivia — but 
those who are accustomed to investigate such matters agree that the 
seeker after feminine favors in Santa Cruz need never leave the block 
in which he chances to find himself. Plain-spoken foreign residents 

545 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

put it baldly that virginity never survives the twelfth year, but this is 
no doubt an exaggeration. The causes of this lack of social tautness 
are several. The overstock of one sex, due largely to the migration 
of the young men to the rubber forests of the Beni, often never to 
return; a widespread poverty and the lack of any independent means 
of livelihood for women; and a tropical apathy, even of character, 
are perhaps the chief. Then, too, there is a marked absence of good 
example. The higher officials and more wealthy men have, with rare 
exceptions, at least one irregular household; not a few have only 
irregular ones. The story is current of one of the chief political pow- 
ers of the department who decided to visit his daughter at school in 
Germany. Forewarned, that startled young lady hastened to write: 
" If you and mama are coming to Germany, you must get married 
first." The father yielded good-naturedly to this quaint whim of a 
favorite daughter, and during the weeks before his departure, spread 
the story far and wide as one of his best after-dinner witticisms. The 
native priests almost invariably have concubines. Some, using the 
transparent subterfuge common to all Latin-America, refer to their 
families as " housekeeper " and " nephews." Not a few frankly speak 
of " the mother of my children." With rare exceptions this runs to 
the plural. Among the masses, naturally, these conditions are not im- 
proved upon. Marriage, troublesome, expensive, and conspicuous, 
hardly bringing even the advantage of neighborly approbation, is apt 
to be looked upon as a nuisance ; and it is always hard to go to useless 
trouble in the tropics. The nineteen-year-old son of an American 
resident was pointed out by both sexes as a curiosity, because he was 
still without natural children. The laws of Bolivia recognize three 
classes of offspring, — legitimate, natural, and unnatural. The second 
are inalienable heirs to one fifth the father's property. The third 
division comprises those born out of wedlock to parents who could 
not marry if they wished, — that is, one or both of whom is already 
married, or has taken the priestly vows of celibacy. The town has 
little notion of the viewpoint of the rest of the world on this subject. 
Like an island far out at sea, all but cut off from the rest of mankind, 
it has developed customs — or a lack of them — of its own, its in- 
dividual point of view; and, like all isolated groups, it is sure of its 
own importance in exact ratio to the lack of outside influence ; so that 
barefooted crucenos are firmly convinced that their ways are vastly su- 
perior to those of the rest of the world, which they judge by the few 
sorry specimens thereof who drift in upon them bedraggled by weeks 

546 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

on wilderness trails. The term " Colla," used to designate the people 
of the Bolivian highlands, and passed on by the masses to the world 
at large, is here a word of deprecation. 

With few exceptions the foreign residents soon fall into this easy, 
tropical way of life. The two " Belgian " firms bring in scores of 
young German employees trained in the European main house; and 
there are normally some 250 Teutonic residents. The percentage of 
these is low who are not established within a month of their arrival 
in any part of the region with their own " housekeepers." The recruit 
is shown the expediency of this arrangement by both the precept and 
the example of his fellow-countrymen. Celibacy is alleged to be doubly 
baneful in the tropics; there are no hotels or restaurants worthy the 
name ; the pleasure of forming a part of the best native family would 
soon wear threadbare, even if the Moorish seclusion of these did not 
make admittance impossible. To live with even a modicum of com- 
fort in these wilds the white man must have a home of his own. The 
frail walls thereof are slight protection against theft. Unless he will 
reduce his possessions to what he can carry to and from his stool 
or counter each day, a " housekeeper " is imperative. Though a neigh- 
bor might be induced to provide meals and such housekeeping as she 
has time for, the crucefia brings her personal interest to bear only 
on those things of which she is genuinely, if temporarily, a part. To 
her, wages are neither customary nor attractive ; the reward for her 
labors must be a temporarily permanent home. Hence the " servant 
problem " is most easily solved by adopting the servant. Whatever 
principles contrary to this mode of life the youthful Teuton brings 
with him from his native land, they quickly melt away under the 
tropical sun, and there is commonly little resistance to the new en- 
vironment. 

Let it not be understood that there is unusual betrayal or persecu- 
tion of innocent womanhood in Santa Cruz. Rather the contrary is 
true. It is the man who runs the most constant gauntlet of temptation. 
The arrival of a new clerk is sure to cause a crowding of young women 
about the door of the establishment, and to swamp it with pretended 
purchasers. Report has it that a daughter of almost the " best fam- 
ilies " may be won by the employee who will remain a few years and 
buy her a house or leave her a small income at his departure. With 
the poorer classes the usual procedure is to open negotiations with 
the girl's family, to give her mother a present, or win her consent 
through her taste for strong drink. In the wilder regions of the 

547 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

interior the gift of a rifle, or something equally coveted, to the father 
is usually sufficient. Daughters are easily acquired, but rifles are 
scarce. Coming under short contract, the recruit, grown to a darker- 
skinned bookkeeper or sub-manager, goes his way, or is transferred, 
and leaves behind whatever family may have befallen him, frequently 
recommending his " widow " to a newly arrived compatriot. Though 
there is said to be less taking of " housekeepers " than formerly, in a 
given group of thirty Germans, twenty had female companions, six had 
German wives, and four, legal crucena wives. At the time of my stay 
in Santa Cruz, 49 native women were calling monthly upon the cashier 
of a single commercial house for the pension granted them for the 
rearing of their from one to six half-German children ; a"nd these were 
the abandoned mates only of such as were still employees of the firm 
elsewhere, or of the rare few who had themselves left some stipend 
for their offspring. The point of view of the Teuton on this subject 
is that he is no worse, but merely more free from " hypocrisy " than 
the Anglo-Saxon. Even the German women accept the condition with 
little protest, often joining in the celebration at the baptism of the 
illegitimate infant of a compatriot. In an isolated corner of the de- 
partment I found a well-educated, likable German keeping house 
with a jet-black negro girl; and not only was his wife in Germany 
aware of the arrangement, and amused by his letters concerning his 
companion, but advised him to keep her as long as he remained in 
Bolivia, that he might have " some one to look after him and keep 
him in health." 

Were the results of these attachments an improved human stock, 
there might be less to condemn. For in its present stage of progress, 
tropical Bolivia is more amenable to economic than to " moral " im- 
provement ; and the country is sorely in need of population. But 
the foreign blood injected into crucefio arteries is as nothing against 
the environment. The sons of Europeans may be an improvement 
upon the natives, at least in those rare cases where the father has 
remained to add the vigor of his training; but the succeeding genera- 
tion is only too apt to degenerate quickly into the most native of 
natives. The assertion of scientists that new blood must constantly 
be brought to the tropics if these regions are to progress, is plainly 
demonstrated in Santa Cruz. Throughout the department may be seen 
to-day in the flesh those conditions which, centuries ago, followed the 
coming of the Conquistadores without their own women or the Puri- 

548 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

tan's point of view, which have made Latin-America from end to end 
the abode of a chiefly mongrel race. 

Attempted improvement of the status quo meets with as little ap- 
proval as in all other centers of the universe. The American directress 
of the government girls' school found herself balked at the outset in 
the simplest matters. Her edict that pupils must not come to school 
without some other nether garment than the customary skirt was bit- 
terly opposed both by mothers and by her assistants, on the ground 
that " it is so hot in Santa Cruz." Crucehos blame the heat for most 
of their shortcomings, as the gringo miners of the Andes sweepingly 
" lay it to the altitude." In the school in question there were 300 
girls of the " best families " of Santa Cruz. One in every four of 
them was of legitimate birth. The teachers were in many cases de- 
crepit granddames, yet no one with a relative or a friend in the gov- 
ernment offices could be removed, because these saw to it that no 
report against their protegees ever reached higher officials. In the 
faculty meetings it was impossible to criticize a pupil, whatever her 
delinquency, for she was sure to have at least one relative among the 
teachers to precipitate an uproar. 

On New Year's Day I had taken up my abode with the only perma- 
nent American resident of Santa Cruz. " Juan " S. Bowles, born in 
Ohio — a cavalry troop of which state he had commanded from 
Atlanta to the sea — had come to Brazil nine years after the war and 
ascended to Santa Cruz by way of the Amazon, in the years when 80 
days of hard labor were required to cover the 280 miles now served 
by the Madeira-Mamore railroad. He had never since seen his native 
land. His ice-plant was for many years the only producer of that 
exotic commodity in tropical Bolivia, where, in the early days, it ranked 
as a luxury at 25 cents a pound. Under his unwilted American energy 
and indifference to local caste rules the plant still produced its daily 
quota, if at something less than that regal reward. On his back ver- 
anda stood a leather bed — an ox-hide stretched on a wooden frame 
on legs — just the place to spend a cruceno night, and his stories of 
" Johnny Rebs " alone made the week I spent there well worth while. 

Sometimes, though with difficulty, his reminiscences could be staged 
in Bolivia. After Santa Cruz had drunk and died of swamp water 
savored with dead cats for some three centuries, this energetic new 
resident imported machinery and drove an artesian well, coming upon 
excellent water some fifty feet below the surface. This he offered 

549 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

for sale, putting out of business the friars who, watching the barometer, 
successfully prayed to the Virgin for rain. The first woman to arrive 
with her cdntaro on her head asked the son in charge if he were not 
" ashamed to sell the water God gave." 

" But he did n't give the pump or drive the well," retorted the boy ; 
" There is plenty of God's free water over there in the swamp." 

To-day the former captain of cavalry has ten wells to his credit 
and is trying to get the municipality to let him install an " aeromotor." 

For all his long residence, the Ohioan had by no means reconciled 
life to the cruceno point of view. His criticisms on this subject were 
biting. Though the town swarmed with " educated " loafers, well- 
dressed according to their ideals, it was all but impossible to get native 
assistants. The youths, egged on by their mothers, flocked to the 
already overcrowded white-fingered professions, rather than become 
mechanics or learn to run an engine, two occupations sadly needed in 
Santa Cruz. As the old man put it, " They won't come here and 
learn a good, useful trade, with pay while learning; yet if you throw 
a stone at a dog anywhere in town and miss him, you are sure to hit 
a priest, a lawyer, or a doctor — with nothing to do." The boys he 
could hire, of the most poverty-stricken families, would not work 
where anyone could see them. Agapito would tote bricks within the 
patio without a protest, but he would take his discharge rather than 
carry a parcel to or from the post-office. The mothers would rather 
have their daughters earn their living in the local feminine way than 
have their sons descend to manual labor. A " caballero," wear- 
ing shoes, without socks, requiring his gun repaired to go hunting, 
could not get it to the shop until he could find an Indian to carry it 
there. 

Bowles was an interesting example of the transplanted American. 
A man of education and of shrewd native wit, he had developed here 
in the wilderness a quaint, isolated philosophy of his own, and was 
one of those rare white men who have spent many years unbrokenly 
in such an environment and climate without " going to seed." Not 
merely was he a wide and reflective reader on all subjects from the 
scientific to the curious, but still, at seventy-five, produced in the in- 
terstices of his labors as chief mechanic of the region authoritative 
articles for the Buenos Aires, London, and American periodicals. 
How great a feat this is only those can understand who know the 
enervating effect on both mind and body of long tropical residence. 
His staunch individualism and independence of the verdict of the world 

550 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

was little short of startling to those of us who live more nearly in it. 
Set away in the fastnesses of the earth, with only his own mind to feed 
upon, instead of having his opinions delivered at his door each morning 
by the newsboy, he had developed a thinking-machine of his own that 
grasped firmly whatever it took hold of, and a hard, unsentimental 
common sense fitted to his environment. His speech carried one back 
to the Civil War, and his vocabulary had quaint, amusing touches ; 
for the words he had added to it since his migration had been chiefly 
from books, with rare and brief intercourse with English-speaking 
persons. Thus his pronunciation of many terms unknown to the 
world in the seventies had been evolved from his own mind amid his 
Spanish-tongued environment. He spoke of " alumeenum," and called 
the recently discovered cause of all earthly ills " Mee-crow-bays." 
Words like " poligamic," rarely heard from any but scientific mouths, 
appeared in the same sentence with " ketched," the past participle of 
Civil War days. Edison's noisy invention he called " pho-no-graph," 
but the word " leisurely " he pronounced correctly, not a common 
American feat. 

This New Year's Day was notable to Bowles for another reason. 
His youngest son and last effective assistant made his first appearance 
in the uniform of a Bolivian soldier, and moved from home to the cuar- 
tel. Conscription is theoretically universal in Bolivia. On the first day 
of each year every youth within the republic who has reached his nine- 
teenth birthday must report at the capital of his department, ready 
for service. Those that are not physically unfit, or have not sufficient 
influence, are given three months training, after which they draw 
lots to serve two years at 40 centavos a day. During my time there 
the plaza of Santa Cruz was overrun with lank country boys and 
sallow city youths, in most cases still in their civilian garb of baggy, 
road-worn linen or near-Parisian gente decente attire, awkwardly 
practicing the right and left face under the commands of youthful 
officers. By Bolivian law a child born in Bolivia is a Bolivian, what- 
ever the nationality of the father. The Civil War veteran, who had 
strictly kept his American citizenship, though married to a Bolivian 
wife, had appealed in vain to the American minister in La Paz. Pros- 
pective immigrants to this, as to several other South American coun- 
tries, should not overlook this point in the future of their children. 
As Bowles expressed it, " Fifteen hundred bolivianos for every son 
born in the country is too much tax to pay for the privilege of living 
in it." When the time came for choosing by lot the recruits needed 

551 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

to make up the peace quota of the Bolivian army, Teutonic in its 
discipline and formation, this useful son of an American " drew un- 
lucky " and was obliged to serve two years, though fate had left 
behind in Santa Cruz many a worthless native loafer. 

But the then most widely-known gringo sojourner in Santa Cruz 
was an Englishman who chose to call himself " Jack Thompson." His 
habitat was the departmental prison. His story was well-fitted to the 
" Penny Dreadful " or the cinema screen. Some years ago " Thomp- 
son " and a fellow-countryman had drifted out of the interior of 
Brazil into Corumba, and offered to sell their rights to a rubber forest 
they had discovered. The Teutonic house that showed interest asked 
them to await a decision, and meanwhile offered them employment in 
the escort of a party of German employees, peons, and muleteers car- 
rying £7000 in gold to a branch of the establishment in the interior 
of Bolivia. On the trail a German of the escort drew the English- 
men into a plot to hold up the party. A week or more inland, at a 
rivulet called Ypias, the trio suddenly fell upon their companions 
and killed three Germans, a Frenchman, a Bolivian muleteer, and 
the chola " housekeeper " ,of the chief of the expedition. The rest 
scattered into the jungle; except one old Indian arriero who, unable 
to run, managed to crawl up into the branches of a nearby tree. 
There he witnessed the second act of the melodrama. For a time 
the trio remained in peace and concord, washed, drank, and concocted 
a meal over jungle brush. But soon the question of the division of 
the gold became a dispute. The German asserted that, as author of 
the plan, he should take half. The Englishmen insisted on an equal 
division. The dispute became a quarrel. At length, late in the after- 
noon, when the unknown observer was ready to drop to the ground 
and a quick death, from exhaustion, fear, and thirst, the Englishmen 
fell upon their confederate with a revolver, two rifles, and a sabre. 
Even a German must succumb under such odds. Leaving the body 
where it fell, the pair divided the gold, and each swinging a pair of 
saddlebags over a shoulder, struck off into the trackless jungle, for 
some reason fancying this a surer escape than to mount mules and 
dash for safety in Brazil. 

Meanwhile some of the refugees had reached nearby settlements. 
Several search parties were made up and, having buried what the 
vultures had left, took up the scent. The natives of these jungle 
regions are not easily eluded in their own element. For four days 
the Britons struggled through the tropical wilderness, half-dead from 

552 




V. ? 



3 O 



S>* ft. 




LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

thirst — for it was September, at the end of the dry season — and 
soon reduced to a few native berries as food. The gold became too 
heavy for their waning forces. They managed to climb to the summit 
of a jungle bluff and bury most of it. On the fifth day a search party 
came upon them resting in a shaded thicket. A volley killed his 
companion and slightly wounded " Thompson." Leaving the corpse 
for the vultures, the pursuers tracked the wounded man all night and 
next morning caught him at bay. Having pointed out the hiding- 
place of the gold, he was set backward astride a mule with his hands 
tied behind him and, amid such persecution as the savage, half-Indian 
Bolivian can invent, was escorted to San Jose, and later driven through 
the jungle and lodged in the departmental prison. 

All this had occurred three years before. Twice " Thompson," who 
was a Mason, as are some of the officials of Bolivia, " escaped." The 
first time he was found drunk in the plaza before his evasion was 
known; the second, he walked the 160 leagues to Yacuiva through 
the jungle without once touching the trail, only to celebrate too early 
what he fancied, for lack of geographical knowledge, was his escape 
into the Argentine, and be forced to walk all the way back. Finally, 
after more than a year in prison, he had been tried — on paper, as in 
all Spanish-America — and within another twelve-month had coaxed 
the judge to deliver his verdict and sentence him — to be shot. The 
supreme court and the president had still to pass upon the matter, and 
another year had drifted by. 

Of late years it is not easy to gain admittance to the prison of 
Santa Cruz. About its doors swarm ragged sentinels who scream 
frantically '" Cabo de Guardia!" ("Corporal of the Guard"), and 
swing their aged muskets menacingly whenever a stranger pauses to 
speak to them. But a note from the prefect brought me the attention 
of the haughty superiors of the " Policia de Seguridad," who saw fit to 
permit me to wade across the first patio of the prison. There an 
insolent half-negro in the remnants of a faded khaki uniform felt 
me carefully over for firearms, and at length deigned to open a wooden- 
barred door. Beyond another mud-floored anteroom and through 
another wooden gate, I found myself in a bare patio some forty feet 
square, with a deep open well and signs that the entire yard became 
a pond whenever it rained. This was surrounded on all sides by an 
ancient low building of adobe, under the projecting eaves of which, 
on the ground or in hammocks, and inside squalid cell-like rooms, 
loafed a score or more of men and several women of all known human 

553 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

complexions and degrees of undress. A single boy soldier of simian 
brow, with a disproportionately heavy loaded rifle on his shoulder, 
paraded in the shade of the eaves. He looked, indeed, like one to 
whose ingrown intelligence could safely be trusted matters of life 
and death! 

My errand made known, several of the prisoners, without rising, 
began to shout, " Don Arturo ! " By and by a voice came back, " 'Sta 
banandose ! " I crossed to one of the cells, a small room filled with 
sundry junk, chiefly the tools of a mechanic, of which the wooden- 
barred door stood ajar. Inside, on a piece of board laid on the earth 
floor, stood " Thompson," in the costume of Adam, pouring a bucket 
of water over his head. I explained that I was drifting through 
Bolivia and fancied he might be glad to hear his native tongue again. 
He was, having had only two such visitors during the year just ended. 
Wrapping a towel about his loins, he stood and chatted, while an 
anemic half-negro in what had once been khaki leaned against the 
door-post watching our every movement, and several other prisoners 
crowded round in the customary ill-bred South American fashion. 

" Thompson " was an unattractive man in middle life, rather thin, 
with the accent and bad teeth of the Englishman of the mechanic 
class, and the uninspired and rather hopeless philosophy of life com- 
mon to that caste. Otherwise his attitude was in no way different 
from what it would have been had we been a pair of tramps met on 
the road. He smiled frequently as he talked, and was neither more 
sad nor more cynical than the average of his class. He made no 
secret of his part in what he referred to as " our stunt," and gave me 
detailed information on how to find the graves along the trail " where 
we pulled it off," in case I should continue to the eastward. He 
plainly regretted the crime, but only because he had been caught. 
Knowing he had already published a doctored account of the occur- 
rence in an English monthly and had found the remuneration exceed- 
ingly useful in eking out his existence in a Bolivian prison, I suggested 
the writing of the whole story. 

" Aye, but they 're not going to give me time," he answered, rolling 
and lighting a cigarette. " I just got word from Sucre that they have 
confirmed the sentence. Now as soon as the president signs it, they'll 
call me out and . . ." 

" Oh, I don't believe Montes would do that to a gringo," I remarked 
encouragingly. " He is a Mason, too — " 

" Well, I don't care a rap whether they do or not," he replied, with 

554 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

considerable heat, " I 'm perfectly willing they do it and have it over 
with. Even if he commutes the sentence, it means ten years more 
of this " — he pointed to the slovenly yard and dirtier inmates — " and 
it 's quite as bad as the other ; I don't know but worse." 

When he had dressed and stepped outside to pose for a photograph, 
he presented rather a " natty " appearance, though his low-caste face 
could not be disguised. Together we wandered through the prison. 
" Thompson," in his striving to be " simpatico " amid his surroundings, 
had become quite a " caballero " in his manner, and spoke Spanish 
unusually well for one of his class and nationality. The prisoners 
found it as necessary to earn their own living inside the prison as out- 
side, for though the government theoretically furnishes food, it would 
not have kept the smallest inmate alive for a week. " Thompson " 
asserted that he had not touched prison fare since his incarceration. 
His " cell " was fitted up as a work-shop, with a bench, a small vise, and 
such tools of a mechanic as he had been able to collect, and he earned 
a meager fare and other necessities by mending watches and at the 
various tinkering jobs that reached him from outside. Shoe-making 
was the favorite occupation of his fellow- jailbirds. More than a 
dozen had their open " cells " scattered with odds and ends of leather 
and half-finished footwear. Formerly, the public had passed freely 
in and out of the prison, and prisoners, underbidding free labor, since 
their lodging was already supplied them, had always earned enough 
to satisfy their appetites. Now, the rules had become somewhat more 
strict, at least to outsiders, and with less opportunity to sell their wares 
more than one inmate suffered from hunger. 

We passed into one of the two large common rooms, foul-smelling 
mud dens in which " Thompson " had seen as many as 37 persons 
of both sexes and all degrees of crime, age, and condition sometimes 
locked, in for an entire month by sfome whim of carcelero or judge. 
The room being completely innocent of any convenience whatever, the 
conditions of prisoners and prison when the door might finally be 
unlocked needs no description. Just now the room was open, and 
there were but 26 inmates, men and women mixed indiscriminately, 
for there were no rules, even at night, as to the sleeping-places of the 
two sexes. The female prisoners, in fact, earned their food as do 
so many crucenas outside, from such of the male inmates and soldier 
guards as could reward their favors, and had advanced to a point 
where even privacy was no longer requisite. Even then several slov- 
enly couples reclined together on the uneven floor in half-amorous 

555 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

attitudes, and on a species of crippled bed in a corner sat an evil- 
eyed fellow of some negro blood, on the floor at whose feet, her un- 
curried head resting affectionately between his legs, squatted a native 
woman in the early thirties, who might years before have been almost 
beautiful. She had killed the " Turk " with whom she had been liv- 
ing, and was for a time under sentence to be shot. The president, 
however, after making her two accomplices draw lots for fifteen years' 
imprisonment and execution respectively — by Bolivian law two per- 
sons cannot be executed for the same crime — the supreme penalty 
falling upon a Chilian, had commuted her sentence to ten years. 
Outside the prison the rumor was prevalent that her lenient treatment 
arose from the fact that she had borne a son to the prosecuting at- 
torney. 

During my stroll my companion ceremoniously introduced me to 
several of the six " gringo " prisoners. One was a German-Peruvian, 
eight months before the manager of a local bank, and since then in 
prison, still untried, on the charge of disposing of bad drafts. When a 
powerful company does not feel it has sufficient evidence to convict a 
man whose arrest it has caused, it is the Bolivian custom to see that the 
judge does not bring the case to trial. Nearly every government of- 
ficial semi-openly having his price, the prisons are apt to hold chiefly 
those who have underbid in the contest for " justice." " Thompson " 
asserted — and he was corroborated by many outside the carcel — that 
for some £200 he could make his escape. The savage half-Indian con- 
scripts serving as carceleros vented their hatred of the gringos at every 
opportunity, and made their lives constantly miserable by watching for 
the slightest breaking of the rules to give them an excuse to shoot. 
In former times, when rubber was high in price, the Intendente de la 
Policia frequently sold prisoners to the " rubber kings " of the Beni 
at 1000 bolivianos a head, and it was a rare victim of this system 
who did not end his days as a virtual slave in the Amazonian forests. 

As we shook hands at the gate of the inner patio, " Thompson " re- 
marked : 

" If Montes signs it, I '11 have forty-eight hours left with nothing 
to do and I '11 write you something. I believe the thoughts of a man 
waiting to be shot " — it was the only time he used that word during 
the interview — " would make interesting reading. The ending would 
be all right if these Indians could make a good job of it, but they '11 
end by bashing in my head with the butts of their muskets, as they 
have all the others." 

556 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

If I have inadvertently given the impression that there are no stern 
laws and rules of personal conduct in Santa Cruz de la Sierra let me 
hasten to disavow it as quickly as I was disabused in the matter 
myself; for it was here that I tarnished my hitherto spotless record 
for non-arrest in South America. I had come to give " Thompson " 
a bundle of American weeklies and was leaving the prison again, when 
a German who had ridden in from Cochabamba asked me to serve as 
interpreter while he procured a gun license. As we stepped into the 
comandancia, an anemic, yellow-skinned half-Indian youth in uniform 
shouted in the most insolent tone at his command, " Take off your 
hats ! " The German quickly snatched his close-cropped bullet head 
bare, but the tone aroused my antagonism in spite of myself; more- 
over, a dozen unwashed natives lounged about the miserable mud 
hall with their hats on. To obey the orders of this class of Latin- 
American officials requires a certain degree of humility, of which, 
thank God, I have not a trace. At the second command I retorted, 
"What for?" 

" In respect for the Bolivian government ! " shrieked the evil-eyed, 
ill-smelling official behind the main desk. 

" But I have no respect whatever for the Bolivian government," 
I protested, warding off with an elbow the boy soldier who was at- 
tempting to snatch the hat from my head; and I stepped out into 
the street. There I was legally immune. There is no law requiring 
one to uncover in the streets, even in straight-laced Santa Cruz. But 
the legal aspect of a case is easily overlooked in Bolivia. The official 
screamed, " Cabo de la Guardia ! ", and there poured out upon me 
five boy soldiers with loaded muskets, who, clutching at me like cats, 
began pushing me back into the prison. I had been long enough a 
policeman myself to know the folly of resisting arrest, however un- 
justified; moreover, there was an entire regiment of these little brown 
fellows in town, most of whom would be only too happy to give vent 
to their dislike of gringos. 

Once I had entered an empty mud room on the first patio, the door 
was quickly bolted behind me and I stood looking out through the 
wooden-barred window upon the mud-hole yard, back and forth across 
which marched the jeering little soldiers and several loungers, grin- 
ning at me nastily behind their blackened stumps of teeth. I was in 
great danger — that I should be late for the dinner to which I had 
been invited at eleven. For though my arrest was not legal, those 
responsible for it had the very simple old Latin-American expedient 

557 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

of holding me " incomunicado " and keeping everyone outside ignorant 
of my plight. I sat down on the window-ledge and fell to reading 
the Spanish paper edition of Ernst Haeckel I was so fortunate as to 
have with me. A half-hour passed. Meanwhile that dinner was a 
bare hour away, and formal feasts are not so frequent in tropical 
Bolivia as to be missed without regret. Luckily, I caught Tommy's 
eye as he dodged under the eaves to escape a new cloud-burst and, 
beckoning him to the window, managed to say, before he was driven 
off by three soldiers with fixed bayonets, " Go tell the prefect . . ." 

The matter never got as far as the prefect. No sooner did the 
comandante of the prison learn that a man, who only yesterday had 
been hobnobbing with the supreme chief of the department, had been 
visited with the indignity of imprisonment, than he hastened to order 
me set at liberty. 

Before we leave Santa Cruz, the story of " Thompson " permits a 
bit of anticipation. Months later, in far southern Chile, I chanced 
to pick up a newspaper, among the scant foreign despatches of which 
my eye fell upon: 

" Bolivia, 14 May — In Santa Cruz de la Sierra was shot to-day 
the criminal ' Thompson,' of English nationality, condemned to the 
supreme penalty for 'having assassinated the conductors of money of 
some local houses." 

Another 'half-year passed before there reached me in Brazil local 
papers and letters giving details. According to these, the judge wept 
when he read the sentence, but " Thompson " shook hands with him, 
telling him the sentence was just, and that the only criticism he had 
to offer was that the execution had been so long delayed. As his last 
favor, he asked that jail conditions be improved, that his friends 
might be more humanly housed. On his last night he got permission 
to have a few of these — all jailbirds — to dinner with him, but re- 
fused to touch liquor himself, " so I shall be able to take in every de- 
tail clearly." In the morning he informed friends that he had parents, 
brothers, and sisters in London, and a wife and son in the United 
States. To these he had been writing since his arrest that he was 
engaged in an enterprise that would in time make him rich, if luck 
was with him. On the evening before his execution he wrote bidding 
them all farewell, saying he had suddenly contracted a tropical disease 
the doctors despaired of, and would be dead by the time they got 
the letter. He was shot at noon, while the bells of the cathedral 
were striking, so that nothing should be heard outside the prison. 

558 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

In Santa Cruz Tommy fell victim to that loathsome ailment popu- 
larly known as " cold feet." An attack of fever and a hazy promise 
of employment for his trusty trowel were no doubt among the causes ; 
it is probable, too, that he had not entirely lost faith in the attractive- 
ness of sandy hair. But the inoculation was chiefly due to the re- 
plies to our inquiries about the road ahead. These were not exactly re- 
assuring. It was characteristic of Tommy, however, that he pretended 
to be eager to push on, while secretly planning to remain behind. 

There is one of the sand streets of Santa Cruz de la Sierra which 
does not run out to nothing in the surrounding jungle, but dwindles 
to what is known locally as the " camino de Chiquitos," and pushes on 
to the Paraguay river, some 400 miles distant. " Road " in the cru- 
cefio sense, however, means anything but a comfortable highway. 
As usual, the town was scornful of the suggestion that two lone 
gringos could make the journey on foot. Disheartening stories as- 
sailed us of the dangers from snakes and " tigers," of the unending 
pest of insects, of the almost total lack of sleeping-places and even of 
supplies. For the first week we must carry all food with us; in this 
rainy season the route was sure to abound with chest-deep mud-holes 
and miles of swamps; the last twenty leagues, near the Paraguay, 
would be completely inundated and impassable for months, until the 
waters subsided. Or, if the rains did not come on at their accustomed 
time, there was as much danger of the country being wholly waterless 
for long distances. Moreover, beyond the Rio Guapay, eight leagues 
east of the capital, stretched the notorious Monte Grande, a dense, 
unbroken forest in which roamed wild Indians given to shooting six- 
foot arrows of chonta, or iron-heavy black palm, from their eight-foot 
bows, with such force that they pass clear through a man at fifty 
yards. This was said to be quite painful. Nor were these mere 
idle rumors; we had only to drop in on one of several men in town 
to be shown arrows taken from the bodies of victims, and a sojourn- 
ing fellow-countryman had several relics of the tribe he had had the 
good fortune to see first while prospecting on the banks of the Guapay. 

Reading Tommy's real opinion of the journey behind his face, I 
laid plans to continue alone. Experienced travelers asserted that 
boiled water, a careful diet, a selected medicine-kit, waterproofs, a 
tropical helmet, and a woolen cholera-belt for night chills were prime 
necessities. I had all but six of this half-dozen requisites. By choice 
I should have turned rural native entirely and worn a straw hat, 
a breechclout, a pair of leather sandals, and a towel. But life can 

559 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

seldom be reduced to such charming simplicity. Two things at least 
were indispensable, — a cloth hammock and a mosquitero to hang over 
it; for the only sleeping-place on most of the journey would be that 
which the traveler carried with him. Then I must " hacer tapeque," 
as they say in Santa Cruz, or " pack " a bag of rice and some sheets 
of sun-dried beef, to say nothing of distributing about my person a 
kodak, revolver, cartridges, and money in various forms of metal. 
Add to this a few indispensable garments, sealed tins of salt and 
matches, kitchenette, photographic and writing materials, and the other 
unavoidable odds and ends for a scantily inhabited 400-mile trip of 
unknown duration, and it will be readily understood why, after mailing 
the developing-tank and even my coat, razor and accessories, I stag- 
gered heavily across town on January 8th, to begin the longest single 
leg of my South American journey. 

Fortunately, the German who had sought my assistance in the matter 
of the gun license, was bound for at least a few days in the same direc- 
tion. Heinrich Konanz, born in Karlsruhe, had served the last of 
three years as a conscript in the expedition against the Chinese Boxers, 
and had since worked as a carpenter in China and California, until he 
had concluded to seek a permanent home as a colonist in some region 
where population was less numerous. He was largely innocent of 
geography, spoke habitually a painful cross between his once native 
tongue and what he fondly fancied was English, with a peppering of 
Chinese, and knew almost no Spanish. The mule that had carried 
him from Cochabamba he found it necessary to turn into a pack- 
animal for the tools, materials, and provisions he had purchased in 
Santa Cruz, and was to continue on foot. He had been placidly 
making plans to push on alone, when rumors in his own tongue sud- 
denly reached him of the Monte Grande and its playful Indians. 
His first inclination had been to throw up the sponge and return to 
Cochabamba. But his capital had been greatly reduced and his hotel 
room was heaped with the supplies sold him by his local fellow-coun- 
trymen, who would not have taken them back at a fourth of the 
original cost. He made a virtue of necessity, added a new rifle to his 
revolver and shot-gun, and offered to find room on the mule for the 
heavier portion of my baggage in return for the reassurance of my 
company. 

It was a brilliant day when I shouldered the German's rifle, my 
own revolver well oiled and freshly loaded, and led the way out of 
town. Mud-holes, along which we picked our way on rows of the 

560 




'.'<; .. 



Konanz seated on our baggage in the pelota de cuero, or "leather ball '"in which we were both 
carried across the Rio Guapay 




The force of one of the four fortines, or "fortresses," with which the Bolivian government 
garrisons the Monte Grande against the savages 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

whitened skulls of cattle, soon gave place to a great pampa, with tall, 
coarse grass and scattered trees, across which lay a silent sand road 
so utterly dry that we had already suffered long from thirst when 
we reached the first " well," a mud-hole thick with green slime, attesting 
by its taste the also visible fact that all the cattle for miles around 
made it their loafing-place and protection from the swarms of flies 
and insects. Here we not only drank, but filled the German's water- 
bag. When the liquid mud in this gave out, my companion took to 
lapping up that in the cart-ruts and the footprints of cattle along the 
trail. I held out until I overtook a boy carrying on his head a pailful 
of guapuru (wah-poo-roo), of which I bought a hatful for a medio. 
This is a fruit cruelly like a large luscious cherry in appearance, grow- 
ing without a stem on the trunk of a gnarly pampa tree, of a snow-white 
meat not particularly pleasant to the taste, but a welcome antidote for 
tropical thirst. 

Twice during the day we met a train of heavy, crude ox-carts 
roofed with sun-dried ox-hides, that recalled the " prairie-schooners " 
of pioneer days, eight oxen to each, creaking westward with infinite 
slowness. In the afternoon the forest closed in about us, and we 
plodded on through deep sand alternating with mud-holes. Soon all 
the woods about us were screaming like a dozen suffragette meetings 
in full session and, fancying the uproar came from edible wild fowls, 
I crept in upon them, rifle in hand. To my astonishment, I found a 
band of small monkeys shrieking together in a huge tree-top. Even 
a monkey steak would not have been unacceptable. I fired into the 
branches. Instantly there fell, not the wherewithal for a sumptuous 
evening repast, but the most absolute silence. The little creatures 
did not flee, however, but each sprang a limb or two higher and 
watched my slightest movement with brilliant, roving eyes. A qualm 
came upon me and I hurried after the German. 

That night we camped in a clump of trees about a water-hole. The 
native who pointed out the trail to it did so in a surly, regretful man- 
ner, as if he resented the consumption by strangers who should have 
remained in their own country of a priceless treasure insufficient for 
home consumption. Down at the bottom of a deep hole in the sand, 
strongly fenced with split rails, was an irregular puddle barely four 
inches deep, full of fallen leaves, wrigglers, and decayed vegetable 
matter; yet from it radiated trails in all directions. The blocks of 
crude brown sugar we had purchased that morning had melted during 
the day and smeared everything within reach ; the boiled leg of mutton 

56i 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

already whispered its condition to the nostrils. The breeze a slight 
knoll promised treacherously died down, and the swarms of insects 
that sung about us all night frequently struck home, in spite of the 
close-knit mosquitero that kept us running with sweat until near dawn. 

Monkeys were already howling in the nearby woods when we pulled 
on our clothes, wet and sticky, in a soggy morning that soon carried 
out its promise of rain; and parrots now and then screamed at us in 
dull-weather mood. A heavy shower paused for a new start and 
became a true jungle deluge. My poncho would have been useless; 
besides, it was wrapped, in Australian " swag " style, around my pos- 
sessions on the mule. Past experience told me that the only reliable 
waterproof in the tropics is to let it rain — and dry out again when 
opportunity offers. We settled down to splash on indifferently, soaked 
through and through from hat to shoes, dripping at every seam. The 
weather was not over warm either, and only the heaviest moments of 
the storm dispersed the swarms of ravenous mosquitoes. 

In dense woods punctuated with mud-holes, a yellow youth in two 
cotton garments overtook us well on in the afternoon, and asked if 
we would need, a "pelota." We would. He stopped at a jungle 
hut some distance beyond and emerged with an entire ox-hide, sun- 
dried and still covered with the long red hair of its original owner, 
folded in four like a sheet of writing paper, on his head. For a 
mile or more he plodded noiselessly behind us. Then suddenly the 
forest opened out upon the notorious Guapay, or Rio Grande, a yellow- 
brown stream, wide as the lower Connecticut, flowing swiftly north- 
ward to join the Mamore on its journey to the Amazon. We splashed 
a mile or more up along its edge, to offset the distance we should be 
carried downstream before striking a landing opposite. Here two 
men of bleached-brown skin, each completely naked but for a palm- 
leaf hat securely tied on, relieved our companion of his load and set 
about turning it into a boat. These " pelotas de cuero " ("leather 
balls ") are the ferries of all this region, being transportable, whereas 
a wooden boat, left behind, would be stolen by the " indios bravos." 
Around the edge of the hide were a dozen loop-holes through which 
was threaded a cord that drew it up into the form of a rude tub. To 
add firmness to this, the hat-wearers laid a corduroy of green poles 
in the bottom. Then they piled our baggage into it, set the German 
atop, and dragged it down the sloping mud bank into the water, while 
the youth coaxed the mule into the stream and swam with it for the 
opposite shore. This seemed load enough and to spare. But when I 

562 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

had fulfilled my duties as official photographer of the expedition, I, 
too, was lifted in, as they would no doubt have piled in Tommy also, 
had he been with us, and away we went, easily 500 pounds, speeding 
down the racing yellow stream, the naked ferrymen first wading, then 
swimming beside us, clutching the pelota, the " gunwales " of which 
were in places by no means an inch above the water. Had the none- 
too-stout cord broken, the hide would instantly have flattened out and 
left us — for an all-too-brief moment — like passengers on the magic 
carpet of oriental fairy-tales. 

Before and high above us, where the peloteros coaxed the crazy 
craft ashore, stretching like a Chinese wall of vegetation further than 
the eye could follow in either direction, stood an impenetrable forest, 
the famous Monte Grande, or " Great Wilderness," of Bolivia. Here 
was the chief haunt of the wild Indians of the penetrating arrow, 
a region otherwise uninhabited, through which the " road " to the 
Paraguay squeezes its way for hundreds of miles almost without a 
shift of direction. We swung our hammocks on the extreme edge of 
the river, where the breeze promised to blow — and failed of its prom- 
ise, like most things Latin-American. For though the day was not yet 
spent, the journey through the Monte Grande is fixed in its itinerary 
by the four " garrisons " maintained some five leagues apart by the 
Bolivian government as a theoretical protection against the nomadic 
Indians. At dusk a man swam the river with his clothing and pos- 
sessions in the brim of his hat, and soon afterward the stream began 
to rise so rapidly that it is doubtful if we could have passed it for 
several days. 

Almost at once, in the morning, we met a train of nine enormous 
roofed carts of merchandise from Europe by way of Montevideo, 
each drawn by eight yoke of gaunt, way-worn oxen, straining hub-deep 
through the- mire at a turtle's pace. The forest crowded them so 
closely on either hand that we must back into it, as into the shallow 
niche of an Inca wall, and stand erect and motionless until the train 
had crawled by, the wilderness bawling and echoing a half-hour with 
the cries of the dozen drivers with their long goads dodging in and out, 
knee-deep in mud, among the panting brutes. We met no other 
person during the day. Travelers through the Monte Grande go 
always in bands, and the ox-drivers stared at us setting out alone, as 
at gringo madmen. 

We deployed in campaign formation. Our revolvers loose in their 
holsters, the German marched ahead, closely followed by his affec- 

563 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

tionate " mool," while I brought up the rear with his new Winchester. 
Mine was the post of honor and most promise, for the Indians of 
the Monte Grande do not face their intended victims, but spring from 
behind a tree to shoot the traveler in the back, and dodge back out 
of sight again. They shoot seated, using the feet to stretch the 
bow, a slight advantage, in point of time, to their prey. Rumor has it 
that the tribe is by nature peaceful; but they were long hunted for 
sport and are still shot on sight, with no questions asked, and so have 
come to look upon all travelers as tribal enemies. They are said to be 
entirely nomadic, to wear nothing but a feather clout, and to bind 
their limbs in childhood, so that the forearm and the leg below the 
knee become mere bone and sinew with which they can thrust their 
way through the spiny undergrowth without pain. This improvement 
on nature draws the foot out of shape, and the footprint of a savage, 
showing only the imprint of the heel, the outer edge of the foot, and 
the crooked big toe, is easily distinguished from that of the ordinary 
native. However, that was not my lucky day, and I caught not so 
much as a kodak-shot at a feather clout, though I glanced frequently 
over my shoulder all the day through. 

But if the Indians failed us, there were other visitations to make 
up for them. Every instant of the day we fought swarms of gnats 
and mosquitos ; though the sun rarely got a peep in upon us, its damp, 
heavy heat kept us half-blinded with the salt sweat in our eyes. The 
road was really a long tunnel through unbroken forest meeting over- 
head, into which the thorny undergrowth crowded in spite of the 
ox-cart traffic. All day long, mud-holes, often waist-deep for long 
distances, completely occupied the narrow forest lane. The region 
being utterly flat, the waters of the rainy season gather in the slightest 
depression, which passing ox-carts plough into a slough beyond de- 
scription ; while the barest suggestion of a stream inundates to a swamp 
all the surrounding territory. For the first mile we sought, in our 
inexperience, to tear our way around these through the edge of the 
forest. But so dense was this that it barred us as effectually as a 
cactus hedge. We took to wading, now to the knees, now to the 
waist, sometimes slipping into unseen cart-ruts and plunging to the 
shoulders in noisome slime. 

It grew monotonous, but so does life under the best of conditions. 
Moreover, whatever gloom our surroundings created was more than 
offset by the German. Not that he was gay, nor, indeed, cheerful 
under adversity. But the genuine comedian, like an Italian Hamlet, 

5 6 4 



5 ^ 

to 3 

a > 








7* T i 



9K 



. 









LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

has no inkling of his humor. Konanz was at his best when he 
fancied himself most tragic, putting me frequently to excruciating labor 
to preserve outwardly that solemn gravity that was indispensable to 
peace between us. He insisted on speaking " English." This astound- 
ing tongue he had concocted by the simple rule of learning the cor- 
responding English for each German word, and jealously retaining 
the German grammar and form; all this with so guttural an accent 
that the hearer could not distinguish " lake " from " leg." Thus I was 
informed that " He put it his hat in," and " He set him by a boat 
the river over." Our snow-white pack-mule was of that affectionate 
nature that craves constant companionship. But the Teuton had no 
affection to spare, and whenever the animal chanced to stray a yard 
from the spot in which he had left her, he fell upon the poor brute 
with a bellow of rage : 

" Oh, py Gott, Mr. Mool ! Ven I don't hat to lug myself der loat 
all to San Yozay, I rhight avay shoot her der head through. To-mor- 
row, py Gott, I bind her der dree on, der . . ." 

At sunset we waded through a barred gate into the pascana, or tiny 
natural clearing, of Canada Larga, the first of the four fortines. Five 
miserable thatched huts, some without walls and the others of open- 
work poles set upright, were occupied by eight boyish soldiers in 
faded rags of khaki and ancient cork helmets of the same color, and 
a slattern female belonging to the lieutenant. The latter was a haughty 
fellow of twenty-five, sallow with fever and gaunt from long tropical 
residence, a graduate of the Bolivian West Point in La Paz, and 
permanently in command of all the garrisons of the Monte Grande. 
The others were two-year conscripts between nineteen and twenty-one, 
assigned to the forts for a year, usually to be forgotten by the govern- 
ment and left there months longer. 

Our official paper ordered the commander to " give us all facilities, 
wood and water, and to sell us food — provided there was any." He 
waved a hand in a bored, tropical way, and two of the handsomest 
children in uniform brought us wood, and soon came lugging a huge 
bucket of water on a pole across their shoulders. What food could 
he sell us ? Not a thing. Some yucas, at least ? Senor, we have only 
half rations of rice for ourselves. But the prefect said we could 
depend . . . The prefect, senor, has not sent us any supplies for more 
than a month. There was nothing left but to cook some of our own 
rice and charqui, and try to be thankful for even that miserable sub- 
stitute for food. Its staying powers were slight. Twice during the 

565 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

night I ate a large plate of it cold, and spent most of the time hungry 
at that. Not that I got up to eat; much of the night I wandered 
up and down the pascana, fighting the mosquitos and a tiny gnat whose 
bite was out of all proportion to its size, and which the fine gauze 
mosquitero designed for the purpose by no means kept out, though it 
did effectually any breeze that stirred. 

The lieutenant insisted on sending along a soldier to " protect " us 
from the savages. He was a girlish-looking boy of Indian features, 
armed with an ancient Winchester of broken butt, thick with rust 
inside and out. Most of the day he lagged far behind, for the sun- 
dried stretches of road between the swamps and mud-holes hurt even 
his calloused feet. We tramped unbrokenly for seven hours, the 
endless forest-wall close on either hand, without sighting another 
human being, until the jungle opened out slightly on the little pascana 
of Tres Cruces. The sergeant in command dragged himself out a 
few yards to meet us, a rifle-shot having warned him of our approach. 
He had four soldiers and a gnat-bitten female. They called the 
bucketful they brought us from a swamp, " excellent water." It was 
clear, to be sure, and a decided improvement on what we had drunk 
from the mud-holes during the day, the swampy taste not quite over- 
whelming. But it was lukewarm from lying out under the sun, and 
had at least a hundred tadpoles swimming merrily about in it. One 
dipped up a cupful, picked out the tadpoles gently but firmly, and 
forced as much of their vacated bath as possible down the feverish 
throat. 

The gnats of Tres Cruces quickly got wind of the arrival of fresh 
supplies and attacked us in battalions. The previous camp had been 
gnatless compared to this. Known to the natives as jejenes, they are 
almost invisible, yet they can bite through a woolen garment or a cloth 
hammock so effectively that the mosquito's puny efforts pass un- 
noticed in comparison. Wherever they alight they leave a red spot 
the size of a mustard-seed that itches and burns for days afterward. 
What such a host of them had hoped to feed on, had we not unex- 
pectedly turned up, I cannot guess ; surely they were taking long 
chances of starvation here in the unpeopled wilderness. Under no 
circumstances did they give us a moment of respite. Even the sol- 
diers, tropical born and long accustomed to them, ate their supper 
plate in hand, marching swiftly up and down the " parade-ground " 
and striking viciously at themselves with the free hand. We could 
not leave off fighting them long enough to lift a kettle off the fire, 

566 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

without a hundred instantly stinging us in as many distinct spots. 
In bookless Santa Cruz I had had the luck to pick up a paper edition 
of Nietzsche in Spanish, but even in that tongue the journey through 
an entire sentence was impossible. I could not write a word or speak 
a sentence without pausing to slap savagely at some portion of my 
anatomy. My notes of those days are all short and choppy. A long 
sentence was impossible. It seemed unbelievable so tiny a thing could 
bite so. The mosquitero was useless. They could bite through sheet- 
iron. A real dinner would have been a joy, but an hour's relief from 
these incessant pests would have outdone a week of banquets. One 
wanted to run and dance and scream, but tired feet forbade. Much 
as we needed rest, we must keep walking swiftly up and down the 
pascana, wondering how long a man would last on charqui and rice, 
walking day and night. " Oh, py Gott ! " cried Konanz, attempting 
in vain to slap himself between the shoulder-blades. " In China py 
der Boxer der mosquito he pinch is very much, aber here ! " 

Tramping doggedly back and forth in the dusk, I heard the sergeant 
in his hut singing and apparently happy. I raced to his door. Eureka ! 
Necessity is the mother of invention, even among the uninventive. 
He was swinging swiftly back and forth in his hammock. I grasped 
a pack-rope and was soon rushing swiftly through the half-arc of a 
circle. The relief was startling. But to work incessantly with the 
arms was little better than tramping the pascana. If only the inventor 
of perpetual motion had not put his invention off so long. The relief 
from torture quickly made me drowsy. But if the swinging flagged 
for an instant, the jejenes at once brought me wide awake. Before 
long, too, a few hardy gnats solved the problem of catching their prey 
on the fly, like experienced " hoboes." More and more learned the 
trick, until I gave up in despair and took once more to tramping the 
parade-ground ; kept it up, indeed, most of the brilliant, moonlit night. 

In the morning I found that ants had eaten into decorative fringes 
the edges of my leather leggings. Vampire bats had smeared our 
white mule with her own blood. For a long time I could not make 
the German understand what had happened to the animal, until I dug 
up out of the depths of memory the word " Fledermaus." To watch 
him pack was always amusing — also a torture. He had learned to 
do everything in the German style of systematized routine, in which 
the longest way round is always the shortest way between two points ; 
and he knew nothing of " efficiency," of that dovetailing of work in 
such a way as to hasten the process. Instead of lighting a fire first and 

S67 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

having his breakfast ready by the time he was dressed, he must be 
entirely garbed before touching a stick or a pot; and so on clear 
through the loading. However 'often he made up the pack, each detail 
must be laboriously thought out again, and as he could never think 
of more than one thing at a time, the operation was endless. Bring 
him what he needed to load next, and he stared stony-eyed at me, as 
if wondering why I was trying to disturb his meditations. Though 
we rose at dawn, we were fortunate to be off before the sun had 
surmounted the jungle tree-tops. 

The sergeant insisted, languidly and tropically, on sending one of 
his armed boys along. We refused. Should anything have happened 
to the child, such as a sprained ankle in " protecting " us from the 
savages, we could never have forgiven ourselves. All day long we 
tramped due eastward through unbroken forest. Monotonously the 
swamps and mud-holes continued. It would not have been so bad 
could we have waded all the way barefoot ; but the sun-dried stretches 
between made shoes imperative. Never a patch of clearing, never a 
sign of human existence — though I still glanced frequently over my 
shoulder — never the suggestion of a breeze to temper the heat or to 
break the ranks of the swarming insects! We threw ourselves face- 
down at any mud-hole or cart-rut, gratefully, to drink. " It was 
crawlin' an' it stunk, but " — anything that can by any stretch of the 
word be called water is only too welcome in tropical Bolivia. The 
red-hot poison with which the gnats of days past had inoculated us 
from head to foot itched murderously. Amateur wilderness travelers 
have a theory that " dope " smeared over the body will afford protec- 
tion in such cases, but it would be a strong concoction indeed that 
could rout the jejenes of the Monte Grande. The only method is to 
get bit and heal again, as one gets wet and dries again, or goes astray 
and finds oneself again. The one absolute rule is, Don't scratch! 
Not to scratch may drive the sufferer mad, but to do so will drive him 
doubly insane ; and swamp water is infectious to any abrasion of the 
skin, and an open sore is the greatest peril of tropical travel. 

Let it not be fancied, however, that life was sad even with these 
drawbacks. The song of the jungle was unbroken, the brilliant sun- 
shine joyful, for all its heat. In places the road was completely veiled 
by clouds of beautiful white butterflies. Sweating freely, there was 
a spontaneous play of the mental spirits and a sense of splendid phys- 
ical well-being, not the mind-paralyzing gloom of our northern win- 
ters. Up on the high plateau the mind might work as freely, but 

568 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

with this difference : there it seemed to be using itself up, each period 
of exaltation being followed by the feeling that one was much older, 
much more worn out, while here there were no such after effects. 
Though we drank water which, in civilization, would have caused us 
to die of cramps within an hour, the constant sweating carried off its 
evil effects, and though gaunt and gnat-bitten, we both looked " the 
picture of health." The main rule for keeping well in the tropics is to 
live on the country, to avoid canned food and dissipation, and above all 
to get plenty of hard exercise and exposure to the elements. Un- 
fortunately, where food is most needed, it is most difficult to obtain. 

A toilsome eighteen miles ended at Pozo del Tigre — there was some- 
thing fetching about the name of this third f ortin, — the " Tiger's 
Drinking-place." Here were four boys, a cossack post in command of 
a corporal ; also at last there was something for sale, for some one had 
planted a patch of corn back in the forest. Two soldiers brought us 
choclos and huiro, — green-corn for ourselves and stalks of the same 
for the mule. The conscripts preferred coffee and rice in payment, 
for money is of slight value beyond the Rio Grande, but demanded five 
times what the stuff was worth. It was not sweet-corn, and was either 
half-grown or overripe, but was welcome for all that. We threw the 
ears into the fire and raked them out, to munch what was not entirely 
burned or still raw. The jejenes made it impossible to hold them over 
the fire to toast. We squatted so closely over the blaze it all but burned 
our garments, yet the relief was so great, in spite of the smoke in our 
eyes, that we all but fell asleep into the fire. 

The life of these garrisons is dismal in the extreme. The soldiers 
had absolutely no drill or other fixed duty. In most cases they were 
too apathetic to plant anything, even to dig a well, however heavily time 
hung on their hands, preferring to starve on half-rations, to choke in 
the dry season and drink mud in the wet, rather than to exert them- 
selves. Each " fort " had in the center of the " parade-ground " a 
crude horizontal-bar made of a sapling. But it was used only for 
a languid moment, when utter ennui drove some one to it. The im- 
possibility of " team-work " among Latin- Americans was never more 
clearly demonstrated than by the fact that each soldier cooked his own 
food separately three times a day over his own stick fire. There was 
not faith enough among them even to permit division of labor in 
bringing fire-wood. Each set his marmita, a soldier's tin cook-pot 
shaped to fit between the shoulders, on the ends of burning sticks and 
sat constantly on his heels beside it, lest it spill over as one of the 

569 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

fagots burned away. The fellows were astonished to learn the use of 
Y-shaped sticks for hanging their kettles. 

Toward morning I slept an hour or two from utter exhaustion. 
It was astonishing how one recuperated for all the day ahead with so 
short a rest. After all, tramping is not like mental labor; a brief re- 
pose is all that is necessary. The savages having deceived us for three 
days, we lessened our burdens by fastening rifle and shotgun within 
quick reach on the mule, though still keeping our revolvers handy. 
Wild animals are commonly hidden away in the silence of the forest, 
even in such wildernesses, and rarely cross a path used by man; but 
they are not always unseen. We were tramping side by side when I 
pointed excitedly at the narrowing vista of the road ahead. 

" Deer ! " I cried. 

The German, his mind perhaps on Indians, all but sprang over his 
mule. Some two hundred yards ahead a reddish fawn stood grazing, 
and fresh meat would have been more acceptable just then than eternal 
riches. As a three-year soldier it was surely my companion's place 
to shoot; besides, the rifle and cartridges were his. But he marched 
stolidly forward. With no officer behind to give a stentorian com- 
mand, his mind refused to work. Every step was increasing the 
probability of seeing a splendid venison repast for ourselves and for 
the soldiers ahead bound away into the trackless forest. 

" Schiisse doch ! " I cried, in a hoarse whisper. 

Alas ! I had overlooked the preliminary routine of " Ready ! Load ! 
Aim ! " The German snatched hastily and blindly at the pack, leveled 
a gun, and fired. A discharge of bird-shot sprinkled the nearby tree- 
trunks, and the startled deer sprang with one leap into the unknown. 
Konanz had caught up the shotgun instead of the rifle ! 

It must not be gathered, however, that he was not an effective 
hunter, given prey fitted to his abilities. All this region is noted for 
its petas, a large land-turtle, with the empty charred shells of which 
any camping-ground is sure to be scattered. During the afternoon 
the German actually ran one down. 

Tied on the pack, it arrived at the fourth and last fortin of the 
Monte Grande, Guayritos, a larger clearing surrounded by matorrales, 
or palm-tree swamps, and noted for attacks by the savages. The cor- 
poral ordered one of his three men to prepare the turtle. He split 
it open with a machete and, removing all the meat, spitted the liver, 
the chief delicacy, on a stick, while I set the rest to boiling. When it 
had cooked for an hour, the addition of a handful of rice and a chip 

570 



LIFE IN THE BOLIVIAN WILDERNESS 

of salty rock made the most savory repast of several days. All 
through the cooking Konanz had sat moodily by, fighting clouds of 
jejenes and smoking furiously for protection. When the meal was 
ready he refused to touch it. Evidently turtle is not eaten in the 
German army. But for once the inner man all but overcame the iron 
discipline of years. It may have been the smoke that brought tears 
to his eyes as I fell upon the mess ; at any rate he moved away from 
the fire and went to tramp gloomily up and down the edge of the 
pascana. The thick muscles, that in life are so strong that a man can- 
not pull a leg from its shell by main force, were of a dark-red meat 
far superior to the finest chicken — unless appetite deceived me — 
and almost boneless. The comatose condition induced by the feast 
lasted with only an occasional break all night, so that I slept consider- 
erably, even though the gnats roared about my net like a raging sea 
on a distant cliff-bound coast, and a few hundred managed to gain 
admittance. 

A tropical shower was raging when we finished loading. Even the 
soldiers were in a snarling mood. The going was so slippery that it 
was painful. For long distances there were camelones or barriales, as 
the interminable corduroy-like mud ridges with troughs of slime be- 
tween them are called. Every step was perilous, until we were 
splashed and soaked from hat-crown down; after that a misstep and 
a sprawl did not matter. Skeletons of oxen were numerous along the 
way. When the rain ceased, the day remained thick, and the heat was 
heavy enough to cut with a spade. For long stretches we waded waist- 
deep through swamps of long green grasses. A few slight pascanas 
began to break the endless forest. In one of them, and scattered far 
beyond, we met the first travelers since entering the woods, — four 
rusty and mud-plastered wagons, hopelessly mired, others with their 
several yokes of oxen lying indifferently in water, mud, or on dry 
land. 

That afternoon our journey seemed to have come ignominiously to 
an end. An immense swamp or lake a half-mile wide spread across 
the trail and far away in both directions into the now thinner forest, 
the notorious " curiche de Tuna." We attempted to flank it, only to 
have a faint side path end in the impassable tangles of an even greater 
swamp. Wandering in this for an hour, we regained the road at last, 
and, putting everything damageable in our hats and strapping our re- 
volvers about our necks, attempted the crossing. The lake proved 
only chest-deep, but the glue-like mud-bottom all but swallowed up 

571 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the mule, and the pack emerged streaming water from every corner. 
The sun was getting low when we sighted a little wooded hill above 
the sea-flat forest ahead. The road dodged the hillock, however, and 
we slushed hopelessly on through endless virgin forest. Night was 
coming on. The insignificance of man in these primeval woods was 
appalling. Suddenly a large, rail-fenced cornfield appeared in a 
clearing beside the " road," but this plunged on again into the wilder- 
ness without disclosing any other sign of humanity. Darkness was 
upon us when a man in white rode out of the gloom ahead, and all but 
fell from his mule in astonishment. We had passed unseen the branch 
trail to the scattered hamlet of El Cerro, a score of thatched huts, 
constituting the first civilian dwelling of man beyond the Rio Grande. 



572 




The old stone and brick church and monastery of San Jose, erected by the Jesuits, typical 
of the architecture of their " reductions " throughout " Guarani Land " 




The fatherly old cura of San Jose standing before the Jesuit sun-dial in the patio of the 
ruined monastery, now the free abode of travelers. The all-but- 
horizontal shadow across the dial shows 6:30 A. M. 



CHAPTER XXI 

SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

WE took possession of a galpon, a thatched roof on poles, up 
in the edge of the jungle. But the anticipated feast was 
scanty. El Cerro had little to sell and less desire to sell it. 
Konanz was so completely worn out that he threw himself down sup- 
perless, without even swinging his " hang-net." After a hut to hut 
canvass I coaxed a cerrito to sell a pound of fresh beef, which, with 
rice and some little red beans, made such a stew as roused even the 
German from his stupor. We topped it off with the succulent luxury 
of an empanisado, a smeary block of crude, dark-brown, unpurified 
sugar, wrapped in leaves and costing eight times what it would have in 
the jungles of north Peru. Of this we each ate fully a pound, so great 
was our craving for sweets. Gnats were few in El Cerro, and we 
slept such a night as seldom comes to the tropical wanderer. 

Two of them, for that matter. For a time next morning it looked 
as if I should have to continue alone, " packing " my own food and 
possessions. Konanz liked the appearance of the soil round about El 
Cerro and was half inclined to settle there. We went to discuss the 
matter with the horseman of the night before, a Spaniard long resident 
in the region, I acting as interpreter. But in spite of my over-fairness 
in trying not to influence his plans, the German decided to push on a 
few days further, chiefly because the best land was largely held by 
absentee owners. But he insisted on resting for a day. We removed 
some of the grime of travel and dried out ourselves and possessions, 
and in the end even " fed up." For, seeing us by daylight, the people 
of El Cerro regained confidence and decided that they had more to sell 
than they had fancied. For twenty centavos a woman brought us the 
first bucketful of clear water we had seen beyond Santa Cruz. I 
canvassed the town thoroughly and gleaned some green plantains, 
three eggs, and a sheet of charqui, and finally metamorphized sixty 
centavos into a spring chicken. Most of the inhabitants were too 
apathetic to plant anything to break the endless monotony of their rice 

573 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

diet, to say nothing of being too selfish to part with what little they did 
grow. Their clothing consisted of two calico garments and a straw 
hat for the men and a species of flying night-dress for the women ; and 
their industry was chiefly confined to lying in a hammock in the shade. 
The women carried their children astride a hip, as in the Orient, the 
Andean custom of slinging the papoose on the back having entirely 
disappeared. Each family kept a smudge fire burning just outside 
the door, as a protection against the jejenes. Rested up and some- 
what relieved from the " pinch " of insects, Konanz grew reminiscent 
and now and then prefaced some characteristically Teutonic anecdote 
with some such dreamy remark as : 

" In China ve every day chip more ass two hunderd heads from der 
Boxers off." 

Beyond El Cerro the landscape changes. The dense Monte Grande 
with its glue-like loam gives place to a few suggestions of rocks and 
hills, and the palm-trees and frondoso vegetation characteristic of Chi- 
quitos appear. From the " Panteon," a. bit of clearing in the jungle, 
with blackened wooden crosses tied together with jungle creepers 
standing over the graves of former residents of El Cerro, we caught 
a short-cut through somewhat thinner forest to the scattered hamlet 
of Motococito, so named from the motocu with which the roofs are 
thatched. Then we went on all day without another sight of humanity. 
Now and again the trail undulated over little rocky ridges, where the 
woods were a bit more open and the danger from wild Indians — if 
there ever was any — decreased. All day the unshaded tropical sun 
beat down upon us like molten lead. In the afternoon an enormous 
palmar, — a swamp with a sort of leaf-and-bulb growth protruding 
from the water and thickly grown with slender palm-trees — opened 
out on our left and we should have had to wade for miles chest-deep 
but for a new trail recently cut along the edge of the stony, wooded 
hills, not always out of reach of the rising waters. Birds large and 
small, from herons to noisy parrakeets, enlivened the vast, flooded 
wilderness. 

About four, we made out through the salt sweat in our eyes the 
first cattle-ranch beyond the Rio Grande, and soon limped into the 
corral of the " Estancia Equito," at the foot of a slight knoll. A large 
two-story house in wretched condition faced a yard overrun with swine 
and carpeted with the trodden droppings of animals. From the bal- 
cony above, a surly Indian-negro female grumpily gave us permission 
to spend the night where we were, and offered no further assistance. 

574 



SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

Konanz had dropped on his back in the first patch of shade and could 
not be stirred, even to unload the mule; which was as well, for when 
tired out he was hopelessly rattle-brained and apt to be of more an- 
noyance than assistance. While I piled our possessions into a covered 
cart out of reach of the militant pigs, he complained of being ill and 
for the first time accepted some quinine pills. Evidently these are 
permitted the Kaiser's troops, once they are visibly ailing. The mean- 
ness of the estancieros was so Bolivian that they would not even point 
out a water-hole. I hobbled about for some time without finding 
anything better than a hog-wallow, which dogs, fowls, and the Indian 
servants used indiscriminately. The breath of the cattle corral drove 
off the insects somewhat, but the inhabitants, two and four-legged, 
gave us no peace where I had swung the hammocks after much effort. 
I coaxed the German to his feet, and with half the load on the mule, 
half on my own back, led the way a few hundred yards down the road 
to some abandoned reed-and-mud shacks. It required a considerable 
tramp to gather dry wood, and the water, sickly warm and ill-scented, 
had to be carried a long distance from a swamp completely 
covered with a weedy bulb. Luckily, we had acquired in El Cerro 
the " sister " of yesterday's chicken, which, in spite of having jolted 
on the pack all day under the blazing sun, was still half-alive. By the 
time I had " chipped " off its head, performed the autopsy with a 
dull machete, and finally sat down to supper — quickly to get up again 
under the flagellation of insects — black tropical night had fallen, 
and it was not easy to fetch more water to wash the dishes, without 
falling into the source of supply. The German had not stirred since 
he had dropped on his back again — except to drink a pail of soup 
and eat two drumsticks and a wing. Then I must fetch another 
sackful of water, for the sweat of the day, drying on the body, made 
the gnat-bitten skin so many square inches of torture. Under the 
circumstances bathing was no easy task. To have calmly disrobed 
would have been to be instantly flayed alive by the army of insects. 
I piled on brush until the flames blazed high, though artificial heat 
was not exactly required, then threw sand upon them until only a 
heavy smudge remained. Standing astride this, weeping copiously, 
mosquitos and jejenes falling furiously in massed formation upon 
any patch of skin for an instant unsmoked, I poured the sackful over 
me, and finally rolled into my hammock in the streaming moonlight 
between two palm-trees. 

Under the mosquitero the sweat ran in streams along my itching 

575 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

skin ; outside it millions of insects fought to reach me, not a few suc- 
ceeding. Bulls wandered by, bellowing in amorous anger. Now and 
then one paused to sniff at me, pawed the earth savagely, and thrust his 
snout and horns madly into it. Long rolls of thunder sounded in the 
east, growing louder and nearer. The flashes of lightning became 
almost continuous. But the sudden coolness and the fleeing of the 
insects before the rising wind gave such a relief from torture that I 
fell quickly asleep. Suddenly huge raindrops struck me in the face, 
and before I could snatch down the hammock and race for one of the 
ruined shacks, the skies were pouring. Then I must go back for my 
possessions, the damageable portion of which I had taken the pre- 
caution to tie in a bundle. Konanz had gone to no such trouble, so 
that all he owned was scattered over the surrounding country, and such 
things as we were able to snatch in the flashes of lightning proved in 
the morning to be those that could best have stood a wetting. We 
swung our hammocks again in separate shacks, and enjoyed some relief 
from heat and insects. But only a corner of the split-bamboo roof 
above me did not leak like a sieve, and that was not sufficient to cover 
more than half my length. 

The rain had spoiled a tolerable road, tons of which we -carried 
along in the first fatiguing miles of slipping and sliding with every 
step. All day we slapped through " der chungle " with no other sound 
than the swish of our footsteps, as monotonously rhythmical as the 
ticking of a clock. The mule had transferred her affections to me, 
perhaps because I did not use a cudgel on her flanks or torture her 
ears with a stentorial guttural bellow at every step, and no dog ever 
followed a fond master more closely. Had I climbed a tree, the ani- 
mal would certainly have got up after me somehow. Konanz was 
therefore advanced to rear-guard. The woods being a bit more open, 
we managed to dodge some of the sloughs by crawling around them, 
though at the expense of being torn and cut by cactus, wild pine-apple 
leaves, and every known species of thorny tropical undergrowth, so 
that each day saw us bleeding from a score of superficial lacerations 
and our clothing rapidly becoming a tissue of tatters. But the mule 
hated to wet her dainty feet, and must be pushed bodily into each 
mud-hole and driven through it with loud words and well-aimed clods, 
even then often turning back to follow me through the underbrush. 
Once, in mid-morning, when I fancied her well across a slough, I 
heard a crashing in the brush behind me and turned just in time to 

576 




Henry Halsey, the American rancher of tropical Bolivia, and his family 







Saddle-steers take the place of horses and mules in the muddy parts of tropical Bolivia. 
Rate of travel : about two miles an hour 



SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

see the affectionate animal emerge stark naked from between two 
trees, the pack stripped completely off her. 

" Now you see vat you do ! " cried the German tearfully. 

" What who did? " I demanded. " Is it any fault of mine that the 
sex pursues me through thick and thin ? " 

But he was already studying out which knot of the diamond-hitch 
to tackle first in such an emergency. 

In a way it would have been easier to carry my own bundle than 
to work for and humor the German so incessantly. A species of trop- 
ical madness, familiar to many travelers in the wilds, frequently came 
upon him. The simple question of whether or not he wished a block 
to sit on would bring from him a roar of rage, as if he who did not 
know his wishes in the matter were the king of fools. It was all 
but impossible to keep up my notes, to say nothing of lifting myself 
above the surroundings by an occasional page of Nietzsche. If I 
dared draw out pen or book during a pause in the shade at noonday, 
steeling myself against the swarming insects, my companion took to 
looking askance at such occupation. Like most illiterates — meaning 
by that those who can, but have not the habit of reading — he sub- 
consciously resented such action. Perhaps it is n't done in the best 
circles of the German army. He had not heard of Nietzsche, but 
admitted during a cheerful mood that it sounded like a German name. 
In most cases he quickly found some useless topic of conversation, 
or some chore for me to do, going so far as to fly into an open rage 
if I ignored these hints. His moods were varied. From the deepest 
gloom, in which he would not answer yes or no to the simplest ques- 
tion, he would grow suddenly bland and garrulous, almost maudlin 
in his good humor, from no apparent cause, and a bare half-hour after 
some fit of rage he would be bellowing songs of the Fatherland in a 
voice to call down upon us all the savages of the region, had the peril 
not been neutralized by a lack of tunefulness tending to produce the 
opposite effect. The German army ration, he took frequent occasion 
to specify, consists of exactly so many grams of this, that, and the 
other, and Konanz considered any man who wanted his supplies in any 
other proportions a pervert, a weakling, and a rascal. 

Once we passed a train of ox-cars laden with boxes of merchandise 
marked " Via Montevideo en transito para Bolivia," suggesting that the 
Atlantic was becoming more accessible than the Pacific. Most of them 
also bore the information " Ausfuhrgut," denoting their origin ; and all 

577 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

were so old and weather-worn that they seemed to have been months 
on the road. Indeed, goods for Santa Cruz have been known more 
than once to be two years en route. The government seeks to make 
this trans-Bolivian route more popular by reducing by 15 percent the 
duty on imports by way of Puerto Suarez. 

Beyond a swamp which we managed only partly to dodge we met a 
disorganized band of soldiers, each attended by his chola, who might be, 
but probably in most cases was not, his wife, crawling painfully toward 
Santa Cruz with strange assortments of odds and ends on their backs, 
including the indispensable hammock each and several babies. Ac- 
cording to them, the next settlement was so far distant that we gave up 
hope of reaching it that day and camped in the road, where there was 
barely room to pile our baggage beside a mud-hole for cooking and 
drinking. Every hint of breeze was cut off by the forest walls high 
above us, and the night that followed our stew of rice, beans, and 
charqui was one to be quickly forgotten — if possible. Stripped naked, 
the sweat ran off me in streams, soaking through the hammock. Into 
this the iron-jawed insects swarmed in such masses, in spite of the net, 
that I was forced to abandon it to them entirely. For a time I tramped 
up and down the road in the moonlight. But every few steps I 
stumbled half asleep. I built a fire about my hammock and covered 
it with sand, but the smudge had little effect on the insects and made 
the heat and sweat all the more unendurable, so that I stumbled back 
and forth in the roadway most of the night. 

We tramped four red-hot hours to Piococa, all but falling on our 
faces from sleepiness, and dodging the worst sloughs only by many a 
struggle with the jungle. Here, in a small open green backed by rock- 
faced, wooded hillocks, was the estancia-house of a cruceno to whom I 
had a letter. Only an Indian girl, stupid and filthy beyond words, was 
there, however, and we got a guinea-hen and some boiled yuca at last 
only by infinite coaxing. At least there was plenty of rich grass for 
the mule, and a clear running stream in which I bathed and laundered 
and lay emerged most of the afternoon in protection from the gnats. 
In our hammocks under the trees the insects were almost as bad as ever. 
The only possible relief was to walk swiftly up and down. Had I been 
alone, I should have pushed on without a stop until I reached a place 
of rest, but the German was so worn out that not even the " pinching " 
of the mosquitos could stir him up. There was at least a certain curi- 
osity to know how long the human frame could hold up under these 
unbroken hardships. 

578 



SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

At dusk three youths rode up on saddled steers, the chief means of 
transportation in these parts. The saddles were not unlike our 
" Texas," and the single leather rein passed from the ring in the nose 
over the forehead of the animal, between the horns. Steers cross deep 
mud more easily than horses or mules, but are much slower and more 
easily exhausted, and the width of their flanks makes long riding pain- 
ful to the hips. The motion is mildly like that of the camel. The 
natives sat for hours all but motionless, smoking cigarros de chala, 
cigarettes rolled in corn-husks. Between a few gnat-bitten snatches 
of sleep I tramped the yard, pausing now and then to squat beside the 
fire that smudged all night before the native hut, forming a veritable 
curtain of smoke through which the insects hesitated to pass. The 
family inside swung in their hammocks all the night through. What 
secret means the people of this region have to keep their hammocks con- 
stantly moving, while to all appearances they are sound asleep, I 
was never able to learn. More than once I watched them for a long 
half-hour swinging back and forth with no evident means of propul- 
sion, lying all but on their backs, one bare leg hanging over the edge of 
the hamaca, as if these children of the wilderness had long since solved 
the problem of perpetual motion that civilization has so far sought in 
vain. 

In the morning the tendency to fall down asleep in full march re- 
mained. The road was wider and the forest more open, so that the sun 
beat upon us like an open puddling-furnace. We paused to drink from 
any caft-rut or swamp, and to wash from our eyes the blinding sweat 
that quickly filled them again. A huge hairy spider now and then ran 
by underfoot. The natives say they are deadly. We did not halt to 
investigate. Beyond the breathless corner of the woods where we 
cooked the last of our beans we met a welcome sight, — a woman with 
a bundle on her head; not merely the first traveler since passing the 
soldiers, but a sign that we were approaching a town. An hour further 
on we waded a small river, climbed a gentle slope heavy in sand, and 
found ourselves in a silent hamlet of sandy streets and an enormous 
grass-grown plaza backed by a stone church, as out of proportion to 
its surroundings as the Escorial in its village. We had reached at last 
the famous old town of Saint Joseph. 

The heels of my boots had worn away until they protruded from my 
ankles like spurs, and I had been forced to chop them off entirely with 
the machete. My hat had been trampled by the German and the mule 
during the thunder-storm until it was no longer recognizable. Torn, 

579 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

smeared, and bewhiskered with twelve days of jungle travel and mud- 
hole wading, tattooed from hair to soles with insect arabesques, 
bleached and faded by sweat and the raging sun, we were no fit sights 
for a ladies' club as we hobbled out upon the broad plaza. One of the 
huts facing it was the home and office of the subprefect. He, how- 
ever, was " out on his farm " a few miles away, recuperating no doubt 
from the rush and roar of the city. " But all strangers lodge in the 
monastery." We hobbled in at a door under the four-story stone 
tower of that incongruous church, and found ourselves in a former 
residence of the Jesuits. The traveler asks permission of no one, but 
goes and takes possession; for the owners are far away and long 
absent. Now the ancient monastery is in the last stages of dilapida- 
tion. Under the arched corredores, backed by noisome ruined pens 
that were once the vaulted cells of monks, were a score of hammock- 
posts. A half-dozen soldiers and their females occupied some of these. 
We swung our hammocks in the long space left and picketed the mule 
out on the grassy plaza. Here and there on the stone walls were 
crude, life-size drawings of Bolivian boy-soldiers shooting Indians 
clad in feather clouts and armed with long bows and arrows. Three 
arched cells up against the church across the patio had been roughly 
walled up to serve as the provincial jail, with an earth floor and a log 
of wood as bed or bench, its one window protected by hoop-iron bars a 
girl could have pushed off with one hand. In the back arches lived the 
cura, a little, dried-up, hare-minded cholo, with the half-dozen of his 
children not yet old enough to shift for themselves, and their two 
mothers. We learned later that he had twenty-two recognized chil- 
dren, some of them men of importance in the department. Though he 
went about pleading poverty and begging from the Indians, the padre 
owned nearly half the carts that ply the road through San Jose, and 
no small amount of the surrounding acreage. 

San Jose de Chiquitos is the capital of a province so named because 
the early Spaniards found the doors of the native huts so small, as a 
protection against gnats and their tribal enemies, that they could 
only enter them by making themselves chiquitos (tiny) and crawling in 
on all fours. In 1560 Nuflo de Chaves, ascending the Paraguay river, 
founded here the original Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the street plan of 
which may still be imperfectly traced in the jungle a league away at 
the foot of a rock-faced hill. This first settlement was later removed 
to its present site, but in 1695 the Jesuits established here, in what is 
to-day Bolivian territory, under the name of San Jose, one of their 

580 




A German of tropical Bolivia and his "housekeeper." Showing the mosquitero with 

which all beds or hammocks of this region are covered as a protection 

against the mosquitos and jejents 




Santiago de Chiquitos, above the gnat-line, backed by its reddish cliffs 



SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

ten " reductions." Not even the ruins of Paraguay, the republic most 
associated with the memory of the Loyalists, give a better notion of the 
establishments in which the Indian tribes " converted " by the good 
Fathers were gathered to toil for the safety of their souls and the 
filling of the coffers of the society in Paris. The mission remains 
much as it was when the order was expelled from Spanish territory, 
too isolated to be picked to pieces by visitors, its people too apathetic 
to make use of its cut-stone for their own buildings. 

These " reductions " were all alike in plan, — a large central square 
was enclosed by a wall, a ditch, and a stockade, as much to keep the 
" converts " from escaping as to protect them from the wild Indians 
and the mamelucos of Brazil who came in quest of slaves. An im- 
mense church, in the building of which the Pedres made use of their 
subjects as freely as the Pharaohs, stood high above all else. The 
enormous mission of San Jose, conspicuous in its grandeur amid the 
solitude of the jungle as are the monuments of Egypt in their desert 
setting, was built of brick and stone under Spanish artisans, the four- 
story tower bearing the date 1748, and a stone sun-dial in the center of 
the patio, by which we could still tell the hour, that of 1765-. From the 
summit of the tower the town below looked like an oasis in a desert of 
dense green, stretching ocean-wide on every hand. The huge bells 
were still suspended by ropes of guernbe, a vine used in place of nails 
in modern constructions, and so strong and durable that it has held 
these immense masses in place more than a hundred years. The tolling 
of church-bells, striking even amid the rumble of civilization, was 
solemn in the extreme above the utter silence of the trackless selva and 
savage tropical solitudes. 

The evidence is convincing that the first Jesuits to arrive were self- 
sacrificing idealists, filled with a zeal for converts that made even 
trickery, — decoy Indians, abundance of food, dances and festivals — 
fair play. Conversion was absurdly simple. Catch an Indian, sprinkle 
him with holy water, and shut him up within the mission stockade, and 
his soul was safely on the road to heaven. But once these idealists 
had gathered the Indians together and won their confidence, they were 
superseded by astute, hard-headed men of keen business ability, less 
interested in " saving souls " than in winning temporal power and 
earthly riches for their society. The later Padres lived like the 
princes of medieval Europe, surrounded by every luxury the forced 
labor of the Indians could buy. With virtually a monopoly in trade, 
having neither wages nor taxes to pay, they were almost wholly free 

58i 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

from individual competition. They gave each Indian the education 
they considered fitting to his place in life, taught as many trades as the 
society had need of, forbade intercourse with strangers or the learning 
of the Spanish language, made early marriage compulsory, often 
mating couples offhand, as did the Incas, and ruled over their subjects 
sternly, requiring all to rise, eat, work, and sleep in unison at the beat- 
ing of a bell or drum ; in short, they treated the " converts " like valu- 
able domestic animals. From the cradle to the grave the Indian lived 
in complete submission to the Padres. In church and at work there 
was a complete segregation of the sexes under the old regime. But by 
night all were gathered together, often several families under the roof 
of a single galpon, with all the degeneration of customs thereby sug- 
gested. Thanks to the careful fostering of the race, there is said to 
have been 100,000 " converts " in the " reductions " at the height of 
Jesuit power. San Jose is doubly notable historically, for it was here, 
rumor has it, that the Loyalists were planning to build the capital of a 
kingdom of their own when they were overtaken by the decree banish- 
ing them from Spanish dominions. 

The last census in Jesuit days credited San Jose with more than 2000 
inhabitants. To-day it has barely a fourth as many, drowsing through 
life in low, mud huts scattered carelessly along the sand streets some 
three blocks on all sides of the plaza. Not a few of the original con- 
verts of the Jesuits, suddenly regaining their liberty at the expulsion of 
the Padres, " went back to the bush," which accounts for the unmis- 
takable signs of European blood in more than one naked savage laid 
low by a traveler's rifle. Even to-day such reversions to type are not 
unknown ; and this, with the drain of the rubber fields of the Beni, has 
done most to reduce the population to its present low ebb. The in- 
habitants belong to the same general family as the several tribes of 
wild Indians that attack travelers on the road across Bolivia, and which 
are even to-day the terror of San Jose itself, having more than once 
assaulted the place with fury. But in the town this Indian blood is 
commonly mixed with negro or white, and though Spanish is more 
general, the chiquitana tongue, a branch of the Guarani or Tupy of 
eastern South America, is still spoken. 

The chiquitano is in features about the antithesis of our inherited 
Greek idea of beauty. His head is round, with little or no back to it, 
the hair thick, jet-black, and coarse as a horse's mane, his face wide, 
all its features bulky, especially the nose, which recalls the negro, as do 
also the thick, prominent lips. His eyes are black and rather small, 

582 ' 



SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

his ears plump and prominent, his teeth generally white and strong, the 
chin neither prominent nor receding. In color he is light-brown, not 
unlike the Hindu — or the tint of a tan shoe after a month of wear and 
polish. His body is heavy, thick-set, and muscular, though without 
what we call " development " of any particular set of muscles. This 
thick-setness is even more noticeable in the women than among the 
men, the former being more erect and high-chested from carrying 
water- jars and other heavy loads on their heads from childhood. The 
feet are large, with strong, well-separated toes. Their clothing is 
simple and excellently adapted to the tropics, where the looser the gar- 
ment the better the health. The men wear a felt or straw hat and thin 
cotton jacket and trousers, loose-fitting and generally white in origin, 
with a wide leather belt containing several pockets and frequently 
decorated with large silver coins. The women never cover their heads 
and wear nothing whatever except the tipoy, a single loose gown, thin 
and white as a night-dress, without sleeves and with the neck cut as low 
as is possible without danger of losing the garment entirely. In these 
they frequently march into the stream behind the town — for the 
inhabitants of this tropical region are far more cleanly than those 
of the upper plateau — rolling up the garment as the water covers 
them, until it is folded on the head in the form of a turban. As they 
arise from the bath, they unfold a clean gown so skillfully that the 
sharpest glance will catch nothing but tipoy and water. As a race the 
chiquitanos are extremely independent, and very incommunicative to 
any than their own people; like all American aborigines, they show 
outwardly very little of their thoughts and impressions. Hurrying is 
utterly unknown to them, though at times they work with a leisurely 
steadiness. They show few signs of affection, or on the other hand 
of aversion or anger, being, indeed, strangely like automatons or lay- 
figures in their deportment. 

There is far less religion, or at least outward sign of it, in these 
tropical towns than up on the bleak Andean plateau. Is it because the 
highlands, drear and mysterious, like Palestine or the wastes of Arabia, 
bring on a dread that is not felt in the tropics, where nature is, or at 
least seems, more kindly? When a native dies he is buried at once, 
then his family and friends start a " santa novena," — nine days of 
mourning in which they gather together each day to pray and to drink 
themselves into complete intoxication. He who has given occasion for 
the festival is looked upon almost as a benefactor. But there is very 
little hint of mysticism or worship in these post-mortem antics. 

583 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

In the " good old days " of Chiquitos, following the expulsion of 
the Jesuits, the cacique brought each traveler a maid for his service. 
To-day it is the mothers or sisters who offer the guest of the monas- 
tery a companion during his stay. Not even Santa Cruz can compare 
with the former " reduction " in the complacency of its customs. 
The Indians of all this region, it seems, were as free and natural in 
their sexual relations as the ancient Greeks or several other pre-Chris- 
tian nations, seeing no harm in the indulgence of a natural appetite ; 
and while the Jesuit fathers had a decided influence in other matters, 
they had little in this respect. Indeed, there is evidence that the 
Padres set an example in this regard quite at variance with their 
preaching. 

In San Jose I discovered that Konanz could not speak his mother 
tongue. We had called on the manager of one of the two " Belgian " 
houses for information in the matter of homestead colonists in the 
region, and at every few words my companion spilled over into his 
home-made " English." A dozen times I had to remind him that the 
manager did not understand that tongue. Here was exactly the type 
of immigrant Bolivia sadly needs, a man prepared to spend his life 
in the country, capable of sustained toil, and likely to leave strong chil- 
dren behind him. Yet already the politicians of La Paz had given three 
large syndicates title, almost for nothing, to all the fertile portions of 
this immense territory, and these held it shut against settlers who did 
not accept their terms, which, as I heard them outlined to Konanz, vir- 
tually made them vassals to the companies. Instead of assisting a 
fellow-countryman far off here in the wilderness, the manager used 
all his suave persuasiveness to get my companion's name signed to a 
contract of benefit only to his own " Belgian " house, and would in all 
probability have succeeded had I not been there with counteracting 
advice in English. 

These houses are more Jesuitical than their predecessors in exploit- 
ing the natives — " and their own employees," a former one has added, 
on reading my notes. The bribery of government officials to obtain 
immense concessions of land which they make no effort to develop is 
a mere detail of their business methods. They sell at from 200 to 800 
percent increase over buying prices even of Puerto Suarez. A Ger- 
man imitation of a $12 American plow was held at 100 bolivianos 
($40) ; a roll of barbed wire at 40 Bis. ; ordinary shoes, as much ; a 
four-gallon can of kerosene, 20 Bis. Not merely do the Germans 
take advantage of their virtual monopoly to buy of the natives at a 

584 



SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

fifth of the just value, and sell again at five times that; but even their 
dealings with each other are unprincipled. One episode will stand as 
typical. A bank failed in La Paz. The government, seeing all the 
Germans as brothers, notified one of the firms that the bills issued by 
that bank had become worthless, expecting one house to warn the 
other. Instead, the manager gathered together all the worthless 
billetes in his possession and sent them one at a time by natives to the 
rival house, with orders to make some small purchase and bring back 
the change in good money. 

Barter is the chief form of commerce in all this region. We 
chanced to be chattering with the manager of a " Belgian " house in 
San Jose, when the wobbly-minded old cura came in with a long 
document written on the firm's stationery. It proved to be the certifi- 
cate of baptism of a daughter recently born to the manager, whose 
" housekeeper " had insisted on this formality. After much chaffering 
the priest was at last beaten down to three bolivianos for his divine 
services. 

"Caramba!" cried the German, in pretended anger. "If you're 
going to mulct me this way every time, I '11 discharge my housekeeper 
and bring you no more to baptise. And what are you going to take 
for those three billetes ? " he went on. 

The priest ran his dull eyes around the shelves, packed with all man- 
ner of cheap imports, until they fell upon a long array of bottles. Then 
he glanced back at the manager, who was at that moment offering him 
a cigarette. 

" Pues, senor," mumbled the old ecclesiastic, as he accepted a light, 
" I wonder if you have a real good wine, proper to say mass with." 

" Como no ! " cried the German, in his throaty but self-confident 
Spanish. " There is a splendid wine, just the thing for mass, worth 
five bolivianos even in Europe, but " — with a wink at Konanz and 
myself, — " to you, as my compadre as well as priest, I '11 make it 
three." 

The cura accepted the exchange and wandered back to the monas- 
tery with the bottle under his arm. To judge from the condition he 
was in when we returned to our lodging, he said at least a half-dozen 
masses that very evening. 

We were lolling luxuriously in our hammocks one morning, when a 
man in a sun-faded straw hat, cotton jacket and trousers, a long lack 
of shave, and feet that had never known the restraint of shoes, wan- 
dered into the compound and asked Konanz if he spoke English. The 

585 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

latter, full of the self-confidence of his race, had already misinformed 
the newcomer in the affirmative when I drew his attention. There 
was not a hair of the man's head that did not cry native, yet he spoke 
my own tongue rapidly, with only the intangible hint of a foreign 
accent. 

" Where did you learn English ? " I yawned. 

" Why, I am an American ! " came the startling answer. " My 
name is Jim Powell. We was born in Texas," he went on without 
urging. " I don't remember what place, an' when I was small paw 
an' maw they went away with five of us children because North 
America was fixin' to fight. I don't know what country they was 
aimin' to fight, but paw he did n't want to, 'n' so we sailed across the 
ocean to Bolivia. The other seven children was born in Chiquitos, 
an' finally paw he up an' died last year. Maw she 's livin' out to San 
Antonio, an' the rest is mostly scattered around. One of the girl 's 
married to a judge in Santa Cruz an' the others is on the rocks." 

His language was that of the " white trash " of our southern states, 
but was academic compared to the illiterate brogue of his brother, 
" Hughtie," who arrived soon after him. The latter had come to 
Bolivia so young that Spanish and chiquitana were his native tongues. 
He was a bullock-driver for a native owning several carts, and had 
recently been released from eight months in the prison of Santa Cruz, 
at the cost of all he owned, — "Jes' becoze I killed a feller thet was 
monkeyin' with one o' my women." Accustomed as we are to trans- 
planted foreigners of all nationalities in our own country, it was a dis- 
tinct shock to come upon a Bolivianized American. Such atavism 
brought the reflection that civilization is at best a weak and artificial 
thing. 

So completely native had the pair become that the natives themselves 
never thought of them as foreigners. " Hughtie " was soon to leave 
for the Paraguay river with a train of carts, and invited us to go 
along, pretending, native fashion, that he was in charge of the expe- 
dition, of which, in reality, he was a mere peon. When the time set 
came, he wandered into the monastery to say that we should start the 
following night — " if thet there mozo finds thet there bull that run 
away ; " or if not, then the next night. " Hughtie " was a true Boli- 
vian in putting his trust chiefly in to-morrow. 

The shadow across the Jesuit sun-dial was exactly horizontal when, 
refreshed by four long gnatless days and nights in San Jose, we pushed 
on along a road that stretched like a tunnel through the greenery. 

586 



SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

Konanz had decided to travel a few days further eastward. The road 
was of sand that drunk up the rains quickly, but thirst was cor- 
respondingly worse. Jejenes were fewer, though swarms of swamp 
flies added their annoyance. The danger of savages was less than in 
the Monte Grande ; on the other hand " tigers," as the natives call the 
jaguar, were said to be plentiful. The mosquitero protected us from 
these, however, were any protection needed, even when sleeping in the 
wilderness; for the animal is never known to attack unless it can see 
the head of its victim. We were soon splashing again waist-deep 
through swamps, and often wading as laboriously through deep sand 
between them. Beyond the palm-thatched hamlet of Dolores, where 
we saw our first wild ostriches, the country grew more open, with 
scrub trees, the way strewn with appetizing petas, or land turtles, the 
hollow charred shells of which marked more than one camping-ground 
of former travelers. We should have reached the ranch of an Amer- 
ican off the main trail on the second day, had not the German given 
out at Las Taperas, a cluster of three huts at the forking of the ways. 
We camped under a heavily loaded lemon tree, beside a swampy lake 
backed far off by a blue range of low hills. From this flowed a 
clear little stream in which I lay most of the afternoon with only my 
nose and hands out of water and finished the volume of Nietzsche, to 
the disgust of the German, who did not believe in " vashing all over 
der body." 

In the morning we struck off by the faint trail around the lake. 
The day was brilliant, and the going pleasant enough to be enjoyed 
amid my own meditations. I let the German and his animal draw on 
ahead, until they were lost to view in the placid chiquitano landscape. 
At Las Taperas we had bought for twenty cents a whole bunch of the 
fat little " silky " bananas of the region, and hung them on the pack. 
As I plodded on through a low scrub forest and a tough and wiry 
grass, knee-high, hunger gradually intruded upon my dreams, and 
almost at the instant it grew tangible a fresh banana appeared in the 
trail before me. After that they were as nicely proportioned to 
my requirements as manna to the Israelites in a not wholly dissimilar 
wilderness. But what had become of Konanz? Hour after hour 
passed without a sign of him. He was not accustomed to lead the way 
for so prolonged a period. I pushed on more rapidly, not entirely free 
from visions of savages falling upon him. The sun stood high over- 
head, casting down its rays like the contents of an overturned melting- 
pot, when I caught sight of him at last some distance beyond. He lay 

587 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

panting and dripping in the scant shade of a bush, while the mule stood 
tied to another, eyeing him suspiciously. It was a full minute before 
he gathered breath to relieve my anxiety. 

" Oh, you mool! " he gasped, shaking his fist at the ani- 
mal so savagely that it all but tore itself loose, " Rhight avay now I 
shoot you der head through, you " 

Expurgated of its adjectives, the story, during which I was forced to 
retain a deep solemnity, was that the mule, — after having been beaten 
and kicked during all the loading that morning — had suddenly taken 
fright when the German started up from a log on which he had rested 
for a moment, and had run away. For hours the angry Teuton had 
pursued the animal, trailing her by the clue of bananas she had dropped 
at intervals for my benefit, until, no doubt frightened to find herself 
alone in the wilderness, " she come valking pack against me. Chust 
like a vomans, py Gott! Rhunned avay un' den gum scneaking pack, 
pegause she haf to haf der home un' der master ! " 

Beyond the rancho of Pablo Rojo the pampa gave place to monte, 
dense tangled growth not tall enough to shade us from the blazing 
afternoon sun, yet high enough to cut us off in the trough-like trail 
from every breath of breeze, until our tongues and throats went 
parched and charqui-dry, and the red-hot sand sifted in through the 
holes in my shoes and burned my toes. Konanz could only be coaxed 
along a mile at a time, between which he lay like a log in any patch 
of shade to be found. Luckily, the sun was still above the horizon 
when the endless jungle was enlivened by the welcome sight of a 
thatched house framed in corn and banana fields and backed by slight 
wooded ridges. About the gate, toward which we tore our way 
through jungle grass shoulder-high, were toiling three men in long- 
uncut hair and beards, barefoot in their leather ajotas, and wearing 
the customary chiquitano garb of two thin and faded garments topped 
by sunfaded hats of local weave. 

To my astonishment, all three turned out to be Americans. Henry 
Halsey, whose welcome was as genuine as any I received in South 
America, though less expressed in words than deeds, was owner of 
this wilderness estate ; his employees were " Chris " and George 
Powell, younger brothers of the pair we had met in San Jose. Halsey 
was a Virginian whose career had ranged from teaching country 
school to mining in Zaruma and Cerro de Pasco. The altitude 
bothered him and he had drifted to Paraguay, only to find " too much 
government " and to push on into this wilderness as far from the 

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SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

world as a man can easily get. Not because the government of 
Bolivia is an improvement on that of Paraguay, but because its tenta- 
cles rarely reach so far into the wilds, he had prospered. He had all 
but come to grief at the outset, however. Barely had he chosen a 
knoll on which to build his hut, when he was bitten by a small viper 
that swelled one leg to thrice its natural size and left him half para- 
lyzed. For four days he could not move from where he lay, and only 
by good fortune had he water within reach, for no other human being 
appeared until long after his recovery. Now, with a native wife and 
child, as well as his peons, he was in no danger of repeating the expe- 
rience. With American energy he had cleared of the primeval, tropical 
forest a large space that now waved with corn-fields and sugar-cane, 
with bananas and productive ground-vines, and had built a large house 
in the native style and a distillery to turn his sugar-cane into value, 
while his cattle spread over a broad region in which he had no neighbor 
to dispute his sway. His chief problem was to get peons ; for as often 
as a native was named subprefect of the district, he rounded up all 
the laborers for many miles around and forced them to work on his 
own estate. Thus Halsey was reduced to the intermittent assistance 
of " Chris " and George. These Bolivian-born sons of the Texan 
who didn't "aim" to fight were as truly peons as the lowest of the 
natives. They were subject to the same " slavery " that prevails in 
all the region, hiring themselves out for an advance and getting ever 
more deeply into debt to their employer. " Chris " was just then 
" working out " a rifle, and his brother a saddle-steer. They had all the 
diffidence of the native peon, the same point of view, the same loose 
habits, spoke " English " only when forced to, lamely and without self- 
confidence, ending every sentence with an appealing, " Ain't thet right, 
maw ? " to their mother. The latter was strikingly typical of the 
erosion of customs, a " poor white " of our south grafted upon the life 
of tropical Bolivia. Completely illiterate, barefoot, bedraggled as any 
native woman, whom she went one better by incessantly chewing 
tobacco, she had wholly succumbed to her environment, and spoke 
fluently one of the most atrocious imitations of Spanish it has ever 
been my fortune to hear in a long experience with all grades of that 
tongue. 

Here we made up royally for all the hungry days behind us. The 
products of Halsey's exotic industry ranged all the way from fowls to 
milk — huge bowls of real, honest-to-goodness milk, unboiled, un- 
spoiled in any Latin- American way — lacking only bread, which could 

589 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

not be had in these wilds at a dollar a nibble. Its role was filled by 
cold boiled squash, or plantains fried in lard. The craving for sweets I 
found was no personal weakness. Halsey ate huge quantities of 
sugar — which he refined by the primitive method of covering it with 
a layer of mud — sprinkling it on every possible dish and often munch- 
ing it like candy. The longing for fats or grease, commonly supposed 
to be chiefly confined to the arctic regions, was also extraordinary in 
this climate. So great was the demand for lard that it sold at 50 cents 
a pound; the axle-grease supplied by the owners of bullock-carts was 
mixed with soap to prevent the peon drivers from eating it. Among 
the children of the region dirt-eating, due to some morbid condition of 
the stomach, is almost universal, frequently resulting in death unless 
the vigilance of parents is constant. The majority are chalky white, 
weak and sickly, with enormous, protruding bellies. One of Halsey's 
sources of income was the carting of salt from the salinas, shal- 
low lakes some days to the south, around the shores of which it gathers 
in large quantities, to the neighboring hamlet of San Juan, where it 
sold at 25 bolivianos a hundred-weight. The region was well stocked 
with deer; wild cattle belonged to whoever shot them; jaguars were 
not hard to find and antas were so numerous that he shot at least one 
a week to feed his hogs. This stout, bulky animal, largest of the South 
American fauna, known to us as the tapir, lives in the dense thickets 
near streams or water-holes, in which it bathes by moonlight or in the 
gray of dawn. The experienced hunter has little difficulty in waylay- 
ing the anta, since it always follows the same path to and from the 
water. The Bolivian variety is about the size of a yearling calf, with 
short legs and a long, flexible, porcine snout. Its skin, excellent for 
the making of harness, is so tough that it dashes with impunity through 
the densest spiny thickets, often tearing from its back by this means its 
chief enemy, the jaguar. Caught young, the anta becomes as tame as 
a puppy, following its master with marked devotion. 

Four days I swung my hammock under a great tree before Halsey's 
door, reading belated magazines of the light-weight order, the neurotic 
artificiality of which seemed particularly ridiculous against this back- 
ground of primitive nature, as the complexity of life in great cities 
stood out by contrast to the simple ways of the region. Lounging in 
the tropical shade it was easy to understand why men so often settle 
down in the tropics and let the world drift on without them, easy to 
lose the feeling that life is short and fleeting, that one will be a long 
time dead, and must grasp existence as it passes. The day after our 

590 



SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

arrival Konanz had fallen victim to chills and fever. My regret was 
tempered by the memory of many a vain struggle to get him to take a 
daily dose of quinine. When he recovered, which did not promise to 
be soon, he planned to explore the region round about for a spot on 
which to settle. I took leave of my fellow-men on one of the last 
mornings of January and struck off alone. 

That day's experience emphasized the difference between trackless 
jungle and even the poorest of roads. Some twelve miles separated 
Halsey's estate from the traveled trail. The faint path through wiry 
grasses and low brush, which he had pointed out to me, died out even 
sooner than I had feared. I pushed on in the direction I knew I must 
go, — south and a shade east. A wooded bluff standing above the 
jungle landscape, like the Irish coast from the sea, gave an objective 
point. It was on the summit of this that " Thompson " and his fellow- 
assassin had planted in vain their "ill-gotten gold; in just such jungle 
as that about me they had wandered starved and choking for days; 
somewhere in this sea of vegetation lay the sun-bleached and vulture- 
picked bones of the more fortunate of the pair. 

To keep a due course in the trackless wilderness is not so easy as to 
set it. I was soon among heavier undergrowth that cut down my 
progress like a head wind that of a " wind-jammer," then in head- 
high jungle that made every step a struggle, then in full forest with the 
densest undergrowth snatching, clinging, tearing at me for all the 
world like living beings determined to stop my advance at any cost. 
Vines enwrapped me, head, chest, waist, and feet, at every step. 
Thorns and brambles gashed and tore my sweat-rotted clothing, leaves 
of wild pineapple laid bare my bleeding knees, the jungle reached forth 
and snatched a sleeve from my shirt, slashed my hands, broke my boot- 
laces, poured blinding sweat into my eyes, and treacherously tripped 
me up, so that I smashed headlong into masses of vegetation where 
who knew what might be sleeping or lurking. The scent of wild ani- 
mals was pungent ; now and then I fell into their recent lairs or signs 
of their passing. Every plunge left me so breathless from the in- 
cessant struggle that I was several minutes gathering strength to crawl 
to my feet and tear my way onward. 

All day I fought nature hand to hand, with the growing conviction 
that I should still be struggling when night came upon me. The sun 
beat pitilessly down into the breathless tangle. Once, when thirst 
seemed no longer endurable, I had broken out upon a small swamp and 
thrown myself face-down to drink it half dry. From it radiated the 

591 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

paths of wild animals, and every inch of the wet sand was marked 
with their footprints, as fresh as if they had that moment passed. I 
recognized those of the deer, the anta, the cat-clawed jaguar; and 
those of at least a score of smaller species were plainly visible. Be- 
yond the waist-deep swamp the waterless jungle was even thicker. 
The blue headland of Ypias had long since been lost to view, and I 
found that I was indeed going round in a circle, like the heroes of fic- 
tion, until I drew out my compass and insisted that nature let me 
through the way it indicated. Hunger was completely routed by a 
thirst like a raging furnace within me. Frequently I brought up 
against thorn-bristling thickets so dense that further progress seemed 
impossible, and must tear my way back and forth, as along some 
fortress wall, seeking a weak spot in the impregnable density. 

Then all at once, toward sunset, when I had concluded I was hope- 
lessly lost, I fell suddenly out of the jungle into a sandy road, fell in- 
deed on hands and knees, for the way was worn several feet deep into 
the soft soil. An hour along it brought me to the pascana of Ypias, 
uninhabited, yet like all these rare natural clearings on the trans- 
Bolivian route, so important as to have its name solemnly engraved on 
the map of the republic. This was the scene of what " Thompson " 
had called " our stunt." In a bit of space scolloped out of the jungle 
were the six weather-blackened wooden crosses of the victims, the 
largest crudely carved with the names of all, that of the German con- 
federate with its cross-piece at a sharp angle, the natives of the region 
apparently resenting his claim to full Christian burial. Beyond the 
clear little stream that makes Ypias a favorite camping-ground, four 
ox-carts were preparing for the customary night journey after a day 
of rest and grazing. One of the barefoot drivers under command of 
a cholo astride a saddle-steer proved to be " Hughtie " Powell. I 
climbed into his wagon and stretched out on the great balls of rubber 
from the Beni with which it was loaded. 

Each cart was drawn by twenty oxen, gaunt, reddish, long-horned 
animals that seemed Patience done in flesh and bone. Their pace 
averaged perhaps two miles an hour. Now and then " Hughtie," 
like the other drivers, sprang noiselessly into the sand and, racing 
ahead, lashed each yoke in turn, with insulting words of encourgage- 
ment, and the entire team crowded into one of the close-set jungle 
walls until the massive two-wheeled cart was dragged over small trees 
and head-high bushes at a slight acceleration of pace. A dozen 
strange cries were used in urging the phlegmatic animals forward. 

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SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

When a halt was ordered, the drivers sprang to the ground and ran 
alongside them, voicing a long, soothing wail of peculiarly mournful 
timbre that often lasted a full minute : 

" So-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-c-o-o." 

Once, in the thick black night, the train halted to boil rice and make 
" tea " of a willow-like jungle leaf, then dragged drowsily on. At 
daylight we broke out into the pascana of Motococito, where the ani- 
mals were turned loose to graze for the day, each pair still yoked to- 
gether by a beam that was almost a log, fastened across the front of 
their horns with rawhide thongs, while the peons swung their ham- 
mocks under an ancient thatched roof on poles. We had made four 
leagues, or a scant twelve miles, during the night. 

I made my way to the home of " Don Cupertino " nearby, for no 
traveler across Bolivia misses the opportunity of at least one meal 
with this best-hearted of Bolivians. Outwardly ugly, he was a man of 
fascinating personality, before whom one could sit for hours listening 
to well-told anecdotes, frequently emphasized in his excitement by the 
snapping of his long forefinger, and marveling at the grasp of mind of 
a man who has never emerged from this inland wilderness. So great 
was his magnetism that he had imposed on all those about him a 
degree of human kindness and common decency rare in the region. 
The education of this corner of the republic, wholly neglected by the 
government, he had taken upon himself ; had turned one of his thatched 
buildings into a school for the children of whatever cast roundabout, 
and drafted as school-master a Spanish shoemaker who had drifted 
in upon him., Motococito is frequently favored with attacks by the 
wild Indians, and not the least dramatic of " Don Cupertino's " 
stories was that of the routing of a band of " los barbaros " the night 
before. 

The pace of the ox-carts was so slow that I pushed on alone. The 
sky was incessantly growling off to the southwest, banks of jet-black 
clouds frequently wiped out the brilliant sun, and many a roaring 
tropical deluge set me slipping and sliding at every step. Swamps of 
varying length and depth continued monotonously to intrude, until I 
became amphibious, with water almost my natural element. 

Where the road forked one afternoon I took the fainter, left-hand 
trail for a side-trip to the town of Santiago de Chiquitos. The rumor 
was persistent that " americanos " lived there ; moreover, it was said to 
be situated on a ridge unknown to insects. The heights to be sur- 
mounted were not piled into the sky ahead, as in the Andes. I knew 

593 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

I was rising only by the changing character of soil and woods, the 
former increasing in rocky sandstone formations, the latter more open, 
with diminishing undergrowth. After the first few miles up, the 
forest opened out now and then on little grassy pampas, with V-shaped 
gaps in the wooded hills through which one could look back upon tropi- 
cal Bolivia spreading away sea-flat, humid blue to infinity in every 
direction, with a vast sense of relief after weeks of never seeing the 
woods for the trees that had shut me in. 

The trail split at last into several branches. The one I took at ran- 
dom led me to a thatched hut, then suddenly broke out upon the grassy 
plaza of a great, or a tiny town, according to the point of view and the 
immediate previous experience. A native lolling in a hammock an- 
swered my question with a " si, hay " in the impersonal monotone 
common to the tropics, languidly nodding toward one of the huts 
facing the plaza. Jungle-worn and all but shoeless, my reddened 
knees protruding through the remnant of my breeches, my shirt lack- 
ing a sleeve and otherwise mutilated beyond recognition, unkempt and 
sun-scorched, showing many a patch of my insect-arabesqued hide, my 
face bristling with four razorless weeks, unquestionably the most dis- 
reputable sight in all that disreputable region, a hunger like the Old Man 
of the Sea riding my shoulders, I strode across to the building indicated 
and paused in the doorway. Inside, seated about a snow-white table, 
backed by a butler of African dignity, sat five " gringos " in speckless 
white, dipping their soup noiselessly and without haste with a calm 
backward motion. 

Santiago was the headquarters and place of recuperation of the em- 
ployees of the Farquhar Syndicate, engaged in surveying the 1500 
square leagues of territory recently conceded the company at a nominal 
price. There I slept in the first bed since Cochabamba. The chickens 
that died for us were countless, the inevitable phonograph was in full 
evidence, there were lamps to read by even at night, and books to 
read by them. When the sun touched the jungle sea to the west " los 
americanos " strolled homeward from the office, pausing to play ball 
until dark, with real gloves, but picking green oranges from the plaza 
trees as often as they needed a new "ball." Great bands of deep- 
green parrakeets flew by high overhead, screaming and gossiping 
deafeningly, but with no suggestion of stopping in a place so high and 
cold. From this " mountain " top the sunsets across the humid-blue, 
flat jungle were indescribable, particularly after a rainy day. The 
enormous conflagrations blazed for a brief time across all the western 

594 



SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

world, faded to red, to pink, then into the steel-gray of a tropical even- 
ing; the distant hills turned from deep blue to purple, banks of white 
clouds floating up out of the wilderness below; the sky above faded 
through all the shades of pink to lilac and to purple, until even the 
flecks of clouds tinged with the last reflected rays were wiped out 
entirely. At night, looking south, we could see the fires of the wild 
Indians of the Gran Chaco. 

Besides the Anglo-Saxons, there were the managers of two " Bel- 
gian " houses — the only stores for some hundred miles around, mere 
thatched huts like the rest, with no distinguishing signs — an odd Ger- 
man or two, an argentino who wore shoes ; and the rest were barefoot 
natives, except for an occasional sun-faded passerby. Like San Jose, 
Santiago de Chiquitos, set almost exactly in the geographical center of 
South America, was a " reduction " of the Jesuits, with more than 1500 
inhabitants at the time of their expulsion. To-day it is a sleepy little 
hamlet of some two streets of one-story huts among gentle and fron- 
doso hills, with a constant breeze and no insects, lolling through an 
easy, barefoot, loose-gowned existence, chiefly in hammocks. Coffee 
bushes fill every back yard, the coffee of Santiago being famous through 
all Chiquitos. A languid commerce in cattle, sugar, and alcohol is 
carried on intermittently; the region round about is rich in timber. 
High above all else a wonderfully beautiful palm-tree stands out 
against the cerulean sky. 

The inhabitants retain many of the customs bequeathed them by the 
Jesuits. Only a wooden church was built here, with four bells in a 
wooden tower on legs some distance from the main building. Into 
this an Indian climbs several times a day, and more often by night, to 
make life hideous. Why the Loyolists were so fond of the continual 
hammering of these instruments of torture was a mystery to me at the 
time, but in the library of Asuncion I ran across an old volume that 
explained the matter. The writer, a European member of the brother- 
hood, visiting a " reduction," asked the superior why the Padres saw 
fit to keep themselves awake most of the night for no apparent reason. 
The Jesuit answered : " Brother, we keep our faithful flock toiling 
all day in the fields. After the evening meal they drop at once to 
sleep without remembering their marital duties. Their first fatigue 
worn off, we remind them of those duties now and then during the 
night, waking them up with the noise of drums and bells, to the end 
that the succeeding generation may be larger, to the glorification of 
the Sacred Church and our Holy Society." And to think that I had 

595 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

fancied the jangling of church-bells all down the length of the Andes 
to be a mere caprice of the holy fathers ! 

The fiestas of Jesuit days are religiously preserved. Several nights 
we were kept awake by the monotonous, heathenish beating of a drum, 
often accompanied by a shrill fife. By day, to the " music " of these, 
most of the population marched round and round the town, holding 
hands and swinging them high before and behind them in a kind of 
shuffle and whirl on their bare feet in the silent sand streets, getting 
ever drunker on chicha of maize or the stronger totay. They danced 
also the chobena, to the accompaniment of the manais, a hollow cala- 
bash with seeds inside it. There was no resident priest, but an old 
Indian who had assisted the former cura conducted a service each 
Sunday, always ending it with a debauch that hung over into the mid- 
dle of the week. There is one custom, however, which even the 
Jesuits could not bequeath them, — that of industry. In the olden 
days the entire population was sent to work each morning with 
drums, prayers, and processions ; to-day only the processions, prayers, 
and drums remain. 

As in all Chiquitos, the women and girls of Santiago, chiefly Indian 
in blood, with now and then a trace of the negro, solidly built as an 
anta, wear only the loose tipoy. Their customs are, if possible, even 
more easy-going than those of San Jose. Yet they are by no means 
forward, being rather bashful, indeed, with little sense of wrong-doing, 
and are said to yield more easily to blandishments and trinkets than to 
money. The former priest demanded fabulous sums for his services, 
which is no doubt one of several reasons why virtually none, even of 
the u best families," are married. The moral attitude of the place 
may most easily be gaged by an episode that occurred during my stay. 
A shoemaker living in the other half of the thatched hut occupied 
by " los americanos " learned that the young woman who passed as 
his wife had yielded to the entreaties of one of the foreigners. He 
beat the girl until her cries could be heard in the office across the 
broad plaza. But when, next day, he met the offending American, 
he bowed respectfully with a polite, " Buenos dias, sefior. Y como 
esta uste' ? " 

The distance from Santa Cruz de la Sierra to the Paraguay turned 
out to be 135 leagues, something over 400 miles, divided as follows: 
Santa Cruz to San Jose, 56 leagues; to Santiago, 32; to Santa Ana, 
25 ; to Puerto Suarez, 22. The last stage of the journey I covered 
astride one of the company's mules, hardly an improvement in comfort 

596 




The shoemaker who lived next door to "los americanos" in Santiago de Chiquitos. and 

his latest "wife" 




A birthday dance in Santiago de Chiquitos, in honor of the German in the center background. 

The man dancing with the latter's "housekeeper" is an Englishman 

born in the Argentine 



SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

over walking, on such a route. Luckily, the rains were delayed that 
year, or the difficulties of all this trans-Bolivian journey would have 
been quadrupled, and I might have been held for months in the hilltop 
hamlet of Santiago until the floods common to the twenty-leagues or 
more west of the Paraguay subsided. Day after day we rode through 
the endless forest that crowded us close on either hand, with no other 
sign of humanity than the sulky mozo trotting behind me, sleeping in 
some tiny pascana where a moon so bright one could have read by it 
looked down upon the crosses of soldiers and travelers who had died 
on other journeys, or peered dully in at me through the mesh of my 
mosquitero. Palmares, quagmires thick-grown with hardy palm- 
trees, in which we plunged to the saddle for long distances, alternated 
with thirsty stretches of waterless sand. In places the heavier woods 
gave way to dense brush, head-high and always thorny. Across these, 
to the right, lay the vast Bolivian Chaco — or the Paraguayan, accord- 
ing to how the dispute shall finally be settled — in which the sun set 
so blood-red that the painter who dared put half the reality on canvas 
would be accused of gross exaggeration. A strip of delicate pink sky 
blended quickly into the wet-blue of the endless jungle, darkness 
settled quickly down, and we rode noiselessly on, the sky an immense 
field of stars, bats circling around our heads and alighting again and 
again in the sandy road ahead, to spring up with a peculiar little squeak 
when the mule's hoofs had all but touched them. No other sound was 
heard, except the chirping of the jungle, chiefly the long-drawn creak 
and short staccato of two species of crickets, and occasionally the noise 
of some wild animal fleeing unseen at our approach. On such a night 
we came to the Tucabaca, the only river of size between the Guapay 
and the Paraguay. I ordered a halt until the moon appeared, but 
clouds hid it, and we came perilously near losing a mule in forcing the 
frightened animals across. Frequently the Tucabaca rises in a few 
hours to a raging torrent that can only be crossed in a pelota, or in the 
dugout of a surly old Brazilian negro living in a cluster of huts on 
the further bank. 

At Santa Ana, eighteen waterless miles beyond, we were overtaken 
by two of the gringo colony of Santiago. Calling itself a city, the 
place is merely a row of thatched huts around a grass-grown space, 
with a mud-hole to keep it alive, saintly in its customs as all the 
towns of this saintly route. Its corregidor takes orders, not from 
the subprefect of San Jose, but from the delegado at Puerto Suarez, 
sent out from La Paz by way of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and 

597 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

Brazil ! The place is a headquarters of jejenes, and the wild Indians 
descend upon it periodically. At the very edge of the hamlet lies a 
barrizal, a mud-hole three miles long, famous for its victims. But 
beyond, territory which the year before had been an almost unbroken 
lake was for long stretches without water to drink, though we wal- 
lowed in more than one swamp and slough. Near the corrals of 
Yacuces, in a low, humid region where rain often falls, we came 
upon telegraph-poles, old and sagging, heavy with parasites and 
creepers. The line planned by the government from Puerto Suarez 
to Santa Cruz had been abandoned some forty miles out, and cart- 
drivers now cut down the poles and use the wire to repair their 
wagons. 

On the last morning we woke at two to find the moon brilliant, and 
pulling on our soggy garments, pushed eagerly forward. On the right 
the Southern Cross stood forth brightly whenever a fleck of cloud 
veiled the moon. Away in the forest monkeys wailed their ever- 
lasting plaint. Great masses of green vines, covering irregular giant 
bushes, looked like German castles in the moonlight. The first flush 
of day showed in the V-shaped opening ahead the shoulders of the 
advance horseman, cutting into the paling sky and blotting out the 
bright morning star. Then dawn " came up like thunder " out of the 
endless wilderness, and somehow it seemed wasteful to keep the moon 
burning after the tropical sunshine had flooded all the scene. Tall, 
slender palms, and all possible forms of trees, festooned and draped 
with vines in fantastic web and lace effects, stood out against the sky. 
Masses of pink morning-glories quickly shrunk under the sun's glare ; 
brown moor-hens, flicking their black tails saucily, foraged about mud- 
holes and flew clumsily, like chickens, with little half -jumps, as we 
passed. Beyond the pascana of Tacuaral, with its myriad of slim 
tacuara palms, the country that should have been flooded at this sea- 
son was utterly waterless. Hour after sun-baked hour we jogged on, 
our thirsty animals stumbling in the enormous sun-dried cart-ruts. 
An occasional hut with a banana-grove appeared in a tiny space shaved 
out of the bristling forest. In mid-afternoon we sighted through the 
heat rays ahead a wide street, with red-tiled buildings and open water 
beyond, backed far away by low wooded ridges, and the Port of Suarez 
and the end of Bolivia was at hand. It was two months to a day since 
Tommy and I had set out from Cochabamba. 

Dawn was just beginning to paint red the humid air between jungle 
and sky across the lagoon of Caceres, a backwater of the river Para- 

598 



SKIRTING THE GRAN CHACO 

guay, when I descended to its edge and, by dint of acrobatic feats 
of equilibrium, managed a bath and left behind in the mud and slime, 
like fallen heroes of many a campaign, the remnants of my tramp- 
ing garb. As I climbed the bank new-clad, there persisted the feel- 
ing that I had heartlessly abandoned some faithful friend of long stand- 
ing. The gasoline launch chugged more than two hours across the 
muddy lagoa before there rose from the jungle, on a bit of knoll, 
the modern city of Corumba, in the Brazilian State of Matto Grosso, to 
the residents of which the appearance of a lone traveler from out 
the ferocious wilds and haunts of bugres beyond the lagoon that ends 
their world was little less wonder-provoking than the arrival of one 
from a distant planet. Here at last was civilization, — expensive 
civilization — and steamers every few days to Asuncion and Buenos 
Aires. 



599 



CHAPTER XXII 

SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND 

WITH a deep blast from her ocean-going whistle the 
Asuncion of the Mihanovich Line swung out through the 
shipping of a crowded port and was off down the Paraguay. 
The steamer was easily the equal of the best on the Hudson ; its officers 
and stewards, all argentinos, were as white as you or I, though the 
passengers ran to all shades, and it was little short of startling to 
see white waiters serving and kowtowing to haughty Brazilian half-In- 
dians and negroes. Green jungle, occasionally broken by prairie-like 
stretches studded with dainty palm-trees, like wheels of greenery on 
the ends of broomsticks, sped rapidly past. We stopped at several 
towns and estancias, now in Brazil, now in Paraguay; here and there 
a lone passenger, standing erect in his boat, was rowed out by a pair 
of peons, and picked up as we slowed down for a moment. On the 
second morning we halted at the estate of an Irishman on Brazilian 
soil, the passengers going to inspect a jaguar and a huge wild-cat in 
home-made cages, while cow-boys roped a steer and, dragging it down 
to the edge of the bank to spare themselves the labor of carrying the 
carcass, slaughtered in plain sight of all what was served as beefsteak 
that noon and evening. Now and again we put in at a little Para- 
guayan town, swarming with barefoot boy-soldiers in faded khaki, with 
a reputation for shooting on the slightest provocation. Old women 
came on board with bread, watermelons, and clumsy native cigars, 
scorning Brazilian money, and demanding the ragged and all but 
worthless bills of their own land. Here a new language appeared, the 
palatal Guarani sounding on all sides. The evening of the second day 
brought us to Villa Conception, one of the six incorporated " cities " 
of Paraguay, which might easily be mistaken for a village. An occa- 
sional estancia along the bank had a little railroad, with screeching toy 
locomotives and an electric lighting plant of its own. The Para- 
guayan gaucho, or cow-boy, had the independent air of men who will 
not be imposed upon. He wore a large straw hat, a colored kerchief 
about his neck, the chiripd, huge, baggy cotton trousers with a pucker- 

600 



SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND 

ing-string about his bare ankles as a protection against the gnats and 
climbing insects, and in most cases a blacksmith's leather apron with 
a long fringe, a necessity for riders through the thorny undergrowth. 
Over this all wore a wide leather belt, with several buttoned pockets 
bulging with their probably not great wealth, and a big knife in a 
leather scabbard stuck in carelessly behind, as if ever ready to be 
drawn on the instant. 

On the morning of the fourth day I was awakened by a long blast 
of the whistle, and peered out of my hammock to find the steamer 
anchored among extensive docks. It was that soft moment of dawn 
when the sun is just trembling in stage- fright below the eastern hori- 
zon, the lower sky streaked with delicate colors, the air of that 
velvety texture known only at such hours in the tropics. Then the 
day blazed forth in all its brilliancy, putting the night breeze to igno- 
minious rout, and disclosing a low city, its chief square lined by two- 
story buildings, the largest of which I recognized, from photographs, 
as Paraguay's government palace. One of a score of hirsute, pirati- 
cal-looking boatmen, neo-poetic names painted in gaudy colors on the 
poops of their crafts, rowed me ashore with a few strokes, and at 
the wooden steps of the custom-house answered my " How much ? " 
with a " What it pleases you, senor." Either the boatmen of Asuncion 
are unlike their tribe elsewhere, or my face had lost that innocent, child- 
like air of earlier days. I rewarded his honesty with two Para- 
guayan dollars, — that is, about eleven cents, — and marching through 
my trunk-burdened fellow-passengers, thrust my bundle toward a 
pompous cholo in a cream-colored suit. He peered through the slit in 
my deerskin kodak-cover, asked a question about the bundled develop- 
ing-tank, waved a hand with a regal-toned " Puede retirarse," ("You 
may withdraw yourself"), and I stepped ashore in Asuncion del 
Paraguay. 

The capital of the Inland Republic is its only real city, claiming 
some eighty thousand inhabitants, or one tenth the present population 
of a land that once, with nearly two millions, ranked with Brazil and 
the Argentine as the most important of South America. To-day, 
thanks to revolutions; anarchy, Lopez and his French mistress, and 
the consequent stagnation, it is in the far background of modern prog- 
ress. It spreads over a considerable space of what is really rolling 
ground — though to one fresh from nearly two years in the Andes it 
seemed monotonously flat. Across the river, on a curve of which it 
halts abruptly, lies the sea-flat, trackless chaco, the abode of nomadic 

601 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

Indians, dense-blue by day, and fading to purple under the setting 
sun. Unfortunately, Francia, " El Supremo," dictator for a third 
of a century, sought to " beautify " the town by filling its lagoons, 
straightening its jumble of tortuous lanes, and reducing it to a feature- 
less similarity to all other capitals of its kind and size. Travelers of 
past centuries are agreed that the chief charm of old Asuncion was 
due to its delightful irregularity. Certainly its ancient fascination is 
gone, and to-day it is nothing but a languid little capital of a stagnant 
country, the least interesting of any I had seen in South America. 

The time-worn assertion that the population of Paraguay is wholly 
Indian in blood is a decided overstatement. In Asuncion one sees 
at least as many whites as in La Paz. Nor is it true that there are 
nine women to every man. True, Francia wiped out the old Span- 
iards for conspiring against him ; forty years ago, in the days of Lopez, 
the wars reduced the proportion to seventeen to one. But time and 
migrating males have all but repaired these ravages, though many a 
man still lives on the exertions of his harem, one of the several women 
of which is his legal wife, and the majority of children born in the 
country are illegitimate. In general the place has a different atmos- 
phere, a blase air little like the towns of the Andes. Among these 
less simple people, particularly the denizens of the " Centro 
Espafiol," where I was " put up " during my stay, one got the feeling 
that conventionality was not morality ; there was something about 
their suave, well-bred manners that made one feel that deep down 
they were no such sticklers for honesty and justice as for the ur- 
banities of life. Or would the artificiality of any " civilized " place 
have struck a discordant note to one coming suddenly out of a long 
stay in the wilderness? 

It is in Asuncion that the traveler from the north notes the first 
advance of the immigration that is to increase to swamping propor- 
tions in the Argentine, as he moves southward. Paraguay is making 
strenuous, though not very tactful, efforts to increase immigration, 
under an immigration bureau in the hands of a German. Commerce 
and government are largely in the hands of foreigners, at least of the 
second generation, even the president being a Swiss in blood and name. 
Paraguay's civilization is not strong enough to absorb the newcomers ; 
one hears German, Italian, or Catalan almost as often as the native 
Guarani. This latter is the real speech of the country. Spanish is 
spoken only in the cities, and even there the people use among them- 
selves the remnants of the aboriginal tongue. Teachers in large vil- 

602 



SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND 

lages often cannot speak Castilian; the few Paraguayan countrymen 
who know it are " afraid " to use it for fear their fellows will 
ridicule them for trying to show off. There has been more than one 
movement on foot to make Guarani the official, as well as the actual, 
language of the country. 

The money of Paraguay has fallen to low estate. Step into a bank 
and throw down an English sovereign, and there will be thrust upon 
you some $90 in native currency, bringing the peso down to little 
more than the value of our nickel. Metal money is unknown; the 
paper bills made in London and New York are in universal use, the 
smaller denominations being ragged and dirty to the point of illegibil- 
ity, and often patched with scraps of newspaper. " The nation," runs 
the device on .these tattered billetes " recognizes this bill as fifty strong 
dollars," which is quite different from saying it will be redeemed at 
that rate. Street-car fares, now 75, had been 6jy 2 centavos, and the 
company had found it necessary to print its own change in 23^2-centavo 
pieces, worth — well, let fractional experts figure it out. Eggs sold 
in the market at $7 a dozen ; a hair-cut cost $5, and it was not a five- 
dollar hair-cut. On the other hand, postage is the cheapest on earth, 
evidently because the rates had been established and the stamps printed 
before the money depreciated. 

After the first investigation I put off replenishing my wardrobe un- 
til I should reach Buenos Aires. It was not merely because the 
tailor showed me shoddy stuff and demanded $350 for a suit of it! 
The local styles were even more startling than the price mentioned in 
so off-hand a manner. The trousers demanded by custom, for ex- 
ample, be they made by a local tailor or imported from Europe, are 
built up as high as trousers could by any stretch of the word go ; then 
on top of this comes an enormous belt-piece, so wide that it requires 
three buttons to fasten it, clamping the garment up about the armpits. 
If only they would use a couple of inches more, they could button the 
trousers about the neck, fasten a collar on them, and dispense with the 
expense of a shirt entirely. In the olden days, it is said, the Inca tribes 
gave the inhabitants of this region the name of " guara-ni " (breech- 
less ones). The bloomer-like amplitude of the trousers of the coun- 
tryman, and the height of those of his city cousin, suggests that 
they resent the implied insult keenly, and have resolved to leave no 
opportunity for its repetition. Somewhere around this uncharted ex- 
panse of trouser every one, from merchant to peon, wears a leather 
belt at least six inches wide, a combination of coin and revolver carry- 

603 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

all, held together with several buckles of the size of those on a horse's 
saddle-cinch. 

The " International " train leaves Asuncion every Wednesday and 
Saturday morning, and lands the traveler in Montevideo or Buenos 
Aires fifty hours later. The through and local fares vary greatly, the 
former being subjected to the competition of the river steamers. First 
and second-class rates to Buenos Aires are $450 and $325 respectively ; 
local fares are $680 and $460! Luckily, this is in Paraguayan cur- 
rency; but even when turned into real money, it remains a respectable 
rate. For half a day we steamed across broad pampas, almost prairies, 
backed by wooded ridges, isolated masses of dark rock standing forth 
here and there in the' middle distance, dim outlines of low mountains 
hovering on the horizon. The broad savannas were speckled with 
cattle, somewhat gaunt, but of vastly better stock than those of the 
Andes, a bulky China bull here and there explaining the improvement. 

Every man on the train was armed, the weapons varying from 
flint-lock, muzzle-loading horse-pistols to the very latest automatic. 
The revolver is a sign of caste in Paraguay ; my companions accepted 
me as one of them only when I had shown my own. When the con- 
ductor came through for tickets, his friends and acquaintances play- 
fully pointed their weapons at him. The faces of many, even youth- 
ful, men were scarred from the latest revolution, like the battered 
facades of Asuncion. Every native aboard, — women, children, the 
train-crew, even the train-guard in his white uniform and helmet — 
smoked big, black cigars, which are really nothing more than the black- 
ened natural leaf rolled up in cigar form. Brown maidens, physically 
not unattractive, sat with a half-smoked stogy in a corner of their 
mouths, and now and then spat through their teeth like New York 
toughs. The cigarette, all but universal elsewhere on my journey, 
finds slight favor in Paraguay. At the stations, peons in baggy 
chiripds mingled with estancieros, their neck-high trousers tucked into 
soft leather boots, a silver-headed rebenque, or short riding-whip, 
hanging from their wrists by a leather thong. Women squatted on the 
brick flaggings, selling anything from raw beefsteaks to the native 
fire-water. Though there were many stations, the towns were rarely 
visible, except a single church-tower marking the site some distance 
off. Being built on knolls, the expense of entering them has been 
avoided by the railway constructors. The few that were seen were 
triste at best, the populations, lolling about the openings that serve 
as doors, ragged and ambitionless. At Loque station, women wearing 

604 




A view from the promenade-deck of the steamer of cowboys of Paraguay slaughtering our 
day's beefsteak on the bank of the river 




A Paraguayan landscape, with native cart, the tall tough grass, and the tacuriis, or ant-hills, 
that abound in this region 



SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND 

from ten to fifty coarse straw hats each, languidly offered them for sale. 
At Patifio a crude tramway was waiting to carry to the bank of the 
river the passengers for San Bernadino, Paraguay's " watering-place," 
on the beautiful fresh-water lake of Ypacarai. Then came Paraguari, 
famous for its revolutions, commercial center of all the old missions 
for a hundred miles around, leaf-roofed, two-wheel carts awaiting 
freight or passengers. Seventy-five miles from the capital we skirted 
Villa Rica, second city of the Inland Republic, with a commerce in 
tobacco, sugar, and lumber, but a mere village in all but name. 

At the small prairie station of Borja, from which some fellow-coun- 
trymen were constructing a branch line some day to reach the Iguazu 
Falls, I abandoned the " International," and was soon speeding away 
across the flat country in a track automobile. At best the Paraguyan 
landscape is monotonous, vast plains of reddish soil and coarse grass 
stretching away until lost to view, here and there broken by thick 
clumps of forest. Ever and again we were slowed down or halted by 
reddish half-wild cattle on the unfenced track; the pampa was sprin- 
kled with them as far as the eye could see. The plains either are, 
or are fancied to be, of no value for agriculture, and are left to grazing, 
while the languid natives, swinging in their hammocks under their wall- 
less roofs in the edges of the forest clumps, raised a bit of corn and 
tobacco in plantations hacked out of the woods, and trusted Providence 
for the rest. Ponderous, springless, two-wheeled ox-carts that seemed 
all wheels labored by. Everywhere the tacuru, or cone-shaped ant- 
hills, stood head-high in the tall grass. My companions told of 
tacurus erected during a single night in the middle of earth-floored 
dwellings and requiring the exertions of a band of workmen to dig 
them out. 

At length we drew up before the rough-board headquarters at 
Charana. It being Saturday evening, the entire region, men, women, 
and children, proposed to ride into Borja on the work-train, to squan- 
der their month's wages and remain several days drunk. The young 
American superintendent, however, issued orders to the Paraguayan 
soldiers that had been assigned him, and though these looked anything 
but fierce in their ragged khaki and bare feet, the throng lost no time 
in obeying their orders to disembark. For all their childlike demeanor, 
the soldiers of Paraguay have a reputation for shooting on scant 
provocation. 

We pushed on along battered old rails, through forest and jungle, 
with here and there a bank of red clay, some ten miles to railhead, 

605 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the line squirming its way around every knoll, the cheap engines to be 
employed requiring that there be nothing steeper than a one percent 
grade. Advance gangs had hacked out a cart-road for some distance 
beyond, where the territory was growing so dense-wooded and hilly 
that the superintendent was considering the use of balloons to survey 
the country. 

Back at the main camp I had my first mate, or " Paraguayan tea." 
The yerba mate is to the life of Paraguay and its adjoining regions 
what coca leaves are to the Andes. In the yerbales the leaves and 
smaller branches of an evergreen bush not unlike the holly, growing 
among taller trees, are spread on a raised platform of poles, smoked 
and dried, forced through to the earth floor beneath, beaten almost to 
a powder with clubs, and packed in tercios by sewing up green ox- 
hides, which shrink until the contents is stone-hard. The gringo en- 
gineers had come to prefer this native beverage to coffee or tea, 
though they drank it in cups, with sugar and milk. The native way is 
to put a spoonful of the powdered yerba in a little pear-shaped gourd, 
pour this full of boiling water, and suck the " tea " through a brass or 
silver tube, or in the case of the poorer people, a reed. One spoonful 
suffices for a score of persons, the gourd being passed from one to 
another of a group, each time being refilled with water, the drinker 
taking care not to burn .hands or lips on gourd or tube. To any but 
a foreigner it would be an insult to offer a separate bowl. The green- 
ish liquid was bitter in taste and by no means pleasant, but was due in 
time to become my favorite beverage, as it does with most gringos who 
continue the use of it. Everywhere in this region one runs upon 
natives loafing in the shade, a mate-gourd, sometimes carved with fan- 
tastic figures, grasped in one hand, lazily imbibing the liquid at regular 
intervals. Unlike the coca, it has no narcotic effect ; it is, on the con- 
trary, beneficial in stomachic ailments. The gaucho of the pampas 
makes it serve as bread and vegetables in his fixed diet of asado con 
cuero, or beef roasted in the hide. Many an attempt has been made 
to introduce mate to the rest of the world, so far, unfortunately, in 
vain. 

I fell asleep toward dawn on a cot set out in the breeze, to the rattle 
of poker-chips, the clinking of bottles and glasses, and cries of " One 
hundred dollars ! " " Two hundred and fifty ! " from the " office " in 
which the gringo community had gathered. Next evening a local train 
set me down in the heavy darkness at Villa Encarnacion, up to a few 
months before the halting-place for the night of the " Internacional." 

606 



SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND 

In name one of the six " cities " of Paraguay, the place was a drowsy, 
barefoot, isolated cluster of buildings, rather than a town. Strewn 
along the side of a red hill, amid half-luxuriant vegetation, on the 
banks of the Parana, the southern boundary of Paraguay, it covered a 
considerable space of rolling, grassy ground, with wide paths of reddish 
sand where streets should have been. Its slight commerce was chiefly 
in the hands of Germans. It was humid with the rainy season, and 
insolent with its big ragged garrison. Green parrots screamed in and 
out of the orange-groves, the fruit of which was green in color even 
when ripe and of rather acid taste. Across the Parana, as wide as 
the Hudson, Posadas, in the Argentine, lay banked up on the sloping 
opposite shore, in plain sight from any part of the town. 

Life is free and easy in Paraguay, close to nature. Its women, in 
their loose gowns and bare feet, very erect from the practice of carry- 
ing loads on their heads from childhood, have a childlike simplicity, as 
well as an extremely graceful carriage. Yet I found this the least 
interesting of South American countries. Its old missions, to the 
ruined churches of which, overgrown with creepers, a ride of a day 
or two from the railroad at almost any point brings one, attract many 
travelers; but I had already seen these and better in tropical Bolivia. 
With its education at a low ebb, chiefly in the hands of priests to 
whom sacred history and catechisms are the sum total of wisdom, the 
present inhabitants of Paraguay leave the impression of being in- 
capable of much advancement. 

The change from this languid little country to the live one across 
the river was almost startling. When the sun had declined somewhat, 
a motor-boat chugged across to Posadas with a score of passengers, 
where we landed without ceremony among a group of Argentine of- 
ficials, well-dressed and courteously business-like. To those coming 
upon it from the direction of Buenos Aires, Posadas may seem small 
and backward; in contrast with the drowsy, little grass-grown Para- 
guayan " city " still in plain sight across the Parana, it is very much 
alive. The capital of the territory of Misiones, that tongue of land 
piercing far up between Brazil and Paraguay and taking its name from 
the Jesuit establishments of olden times, it already boasts some ten 
thousand inhabitants, or more than the entire territory contained ten 
years ago. In spite of being tolerably compact and two-storied in the 
business section, the town covers a vast amount of ground, with very 
wide streets and ample elbow-room everywhere, except in the clustered 
shacks of laborers along the river-brink. A single church, its old 

607 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

red-brick tower still unfinished, rather Protestant than Catholic in ap- 
pearance, by reason of the simplicity of its adornments and the exist- 
ence of seats within, takes the place of the score or more that would 
bulk above a town of similar size in the Andes. Here were hard- 
paved streets instead of sand-holes, steam road-rollers and up-to-date 
machinery, business activity and shoes, well-kept parks with plenty of 
benches, large, prominent buildings as schools — just opening for the 
new year in this first week in March — and well-dressed policemen 
of manly demeanor. Canvas cots had taken the place of hammocks. 
Boys were busy polishing brass name-plates before important business 
houses. The red liberty-cap now adorned all government shields, 
while the most beautiful flag of South America, the Argentinian white 
and sky-blue, flew at the crest of many a facade. Here a stranger 
could pass in the streets without being stared out of countenance. The 
inhabitants had a look of eagerness and .hope in their faces, signs of 
at least a material prosperity in striking contrast to the dreary hope- 
lessness of Andean regions. Yet Posadas is not forty years old, while 
Encarnacion, across the river, was founded by the Jesuits more than 
three centuries ago. 

In the second-class car of the " N.E.A.," the " Nord Este Argen- 
tine," there were no Indian passengers, and though only a mixto, the 
train made good progress. At the very first farm outside Posadas an 
American binder was felling the autumn grain — and I had not seen so 
much as a mower since crossing the Rio Grande thirty months before. 
At every station were uniformed police; mounted, officers patroled 
the country roads. Houses along the way were not the dens of human 
animals, but were supplied with the comforts of home, even American 
rocking-chairs tucked away in the shade of their verandas. I had 
come to the end of the great South American monte and jungle, and 
from now on the great Argentine pampas grew ever broader, slightly 
rolling here, stretching away to infinity on each hand. The brick-red 
soil of Misiones was given over to grazing rather than to agriculture, 
though we passed long autumn-dry corn-fields, the ears broken half off 
and hanging over to ripen. Cattle were everywhere, and cow-boys 
were roping them here and there, while ganchos careered across the 
broad plains on their hardy pintos. The railroad and all its appur- 
tenances were just as orderly as they would have been in England, 
the railway architecture of which it resembled, though the cars were 
of the American style. Everything from engine to yards was so 
English one felt sure that, had they spoken their language, the train- 

608 




The mixture of types in the Argentine, — a native gaucho in bombachos and a 
Basque immigrant from the Pyrenees 



SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND 

crews would have called the little four-wheeled freight-cars " goods- 
vans," and spoken of " metals " and " sleepers." 

It was some time after dark that we pulled into Santo Tome, or at 
least into a station bearing that name, and I concluded that I had 
ridden far enough for the time being. The train did not enter the 
town, perhaps because it would have been hard to decide just where 
the town was. In the Argentine these are scattered over a vast amount 
of ground, in striking contrast to the heaped-up crowding common to 
the Andes. A half-moon dim-lighted the flat country far and wide. 
I set out in the moonlight along a broad highway, and wandered until 
any hope of finding a town died out; then ran upon a few low, scat- 
tered houses that suggested some insignificant village, like Bolivia's 
tropical " cities " ; then I went on and on until there grew up about me 
an immense town, never crowded together, yet with an enormous 
plaza, long stretches of electric arc-lamps,. a checkerboard city of wide 
streets and long blocks, each house set in its own big garden, a town 
well-to-do, citified, with many automobiles, and but a single church, of 
moderate size and inconspicuous. 

Life began to renew about the station at 3 a.m. The restaurant 
opened, watchmen lighted big gasoline arc-lamps, the " International " 
rolled in, and we were off again, with ample room even in the second- 
class car. Three hours later I sat up to watch the sun rise red out 
of Uruguay, across the river. About the vast, long-haired, unkempt 
plains stood clumps of pampa trees ; at the towns were many gay with 
blossoms — spring blossoms, I had almost written, until I remembered 
it was' autumn. The aloncita, a bird not unlike a small robin in ap- 
pearance, though with less red, began to build its beehive-shaped mud 
nest on the wooden cross-pieces of the telegraph-poles. All day long, 
for hundreds of miles, there was an average of a nest on every third 
pole, always on the side farthest from the railroad, as if the noise of 
the trains were annoying to its inhabitants, the arched doorway always 
toward the direction from which we came — the north — to catch, 
perhaps, the warmer breezes. Among hundreds of nests I saw only 
three or four exceptions to this, and all day long only one built any- 
where else than on the cross-piece, close against the pole. One daring 
architect had set his on the top of the pole itself, neatly capping it. As 
this particular pole had its cross-piece already occupied, it looked as 
if the bird above was a hard-headed fellow who had failed to stake his 
claim in time, but who insisted, nevertheless, on living in that particular 
spot. 

609 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

The country grew more and more like our own, in climate, creature 
comforts, news-stands, block-signals, uniformed mailmen, carts and 
wagons, some of them of the boat-shaped style of Poland, rattling past 
on broad highways, busy towns along the way, at only the more im- 
portant of which the train halted briefly, and between them raced 
swiftly and smoothly southward. Through the windows the horizon 
of the great rolling pampa continually rose and fell. Sometimes it 
was punctuated with a grove of trees, more rarely with a small forest, 
the chiefly unfenced plains everywhere sprinkled with cattle. Here 
and there a handu, the South American ostrich, trotted awkwardly 
away across the prairie. Where there were fences, the wires ran 
through the posts by holes bored in them, rather than being secured 
by staples. Well-tended fields of fruit-trees in long rows seemed 
incongruous in South America; it brought a feeling of satisfaction 
to see industry and decent living again, things being done, instead of 
merely doing themselves. Some industrious country boys climbed a 
fence with bags of large, juicy watermelons for sale ; boys merely in 
quest of pocket-money and not because their livelihood depended upon 
it. The population at large was too busy to bother with station hawk- 
ing. Countrymen wore bombachos, enormous bloomer-like trousers, 
tucked into soft top-boots or drawn up about the bare ankles above 
their alpargatas, or hempen soles, as if the cost of cloth were of no 
importance. Any lady would have remained ladylike in them. Now 
and then the river drew up so close beside us that we could look far 
off across Uruguay, spread out on the other side. 

At length we sighted ahead, a sort of oriental mist hovering about 
it, a whitish city with a two-tower church suggesting minarets, a city 
set on a knoll, not unlike Jerusalem. Yet this was not the town we 
were approaching, but Salto, in the " Republica Oriental " over the 
river. Great fields of grapes, well tended, began to race by us, subur- 
ban houses thickened, and we drew up at the in-all-respects-complete 
city of Concordia, four hundred miles south of Posadas on the frontier 
I had left twenty-four hours before. In the Andes, world-famous 
cities had been mere languid villages ; in the Argentine, places the 
world at large had never heard of were large, flourishing metropolises. 
Concordia numbers twenty thousand inhabitants, virtually all white 
and all alive. Yet it is not even the capital, but merely the second city 
of the Province of the Entre Rios — " Between the Rivers " Parana 
and Uruguay, famous for its saladerias, or beef-salting establishments. 
Well spread out, it has few churches and no over-supply of priests, 

610 



SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND 

the former with few bells and those of agreeable tone, which are rung, 
not too often, instead of being beaten with an infernal din. Liquor- 
shops are few; the majority of the population finds something more 
worth while than shopkeeping. Its inhabitants know how to pass two 
abreast on the sidewalks ; women on bicycles bring a frequent start of 
surprise; swarms of cleanly dressed boys and girls sally forth from 
big, well-equipped schools, where coeducation reigns; bootblacks clad 
like business men and carrying upholstered and decorated seats seek 
their clients in the well-kept streets and plazas; electric street-cars 
give excellent service. Electric lights both in streets and houses were 
even more brilliant than our own ; the public library was actually open 
and " functioning," and did not spend its time staring at the foreigner 
who had come to read. In the " Hotel Garabaldi " — just such a place 
as the name implies — wine was served with meals as freely as in 
Europe, and though only the abode of working-men, it was superior 
to the best hostlery of Andean cities. Real beds had now taken the 
place of canvas cots ; at the rear was an electric-lighted cancha de 
bachas, or outdoor bowling alley for the clientele of Italian workmen. 

I slipped across the river next afternoon to Salto, in Uruguay, add- 
ing another country to my growing collection. One went and came 
freely,' without frontier formalities. Salto is large, and several times 
older than Concordia, with many well-built buildings, yet with a sug- 
gestion of " seediness," a bit more squalor and barefootedness, its 
church not so imposing and well-kept as it looks at a distance, its police- 
men in rather shiny and threadbare uniforms, its streets cobbled, 
rather than smoothly paved. In short, it is more Spanish in type, 
more clustered together, with a general air suggesting that this is not 
quite so live and hopeful a country as that over the river. Many, 
proud old families live here; yet the head of more than one of them 
slips across daily to do business in the Argentine. 

One can go on from Concordia to Buenos Aires by rail, but I chose 
to take the overnight journey on a big Mihanovich river-steamer, with 
all the conveniences of an ocean liner. The flat, sometimes rolling, 
occasionally bushy shores of the Uruguay were broken by several 
towns, notably the two model establishments producing Leibig's ex- 
tract of beef. When I returned on deck next morning a brilliant sun 
was pouring its rays blindingly over the stream misnamed the Plata, 
the " River of Silver," by Sebastian " Gaboto " — who was none other 
than our own Sebastian Cabot — because he fancied it ran uphill to 
the silver mines of Peru. The Indians called it the Parana-Guazu, 

6u 



VAGABONDING DOWN THE ANDES 

the " River Large as a Sea," a truer name, for on the right it stretched 
away to the dimmest of broken land forms, and soon these, too, dis- 
appeared, and a reddish-brown sea spread unbroken to the horizon. 
For a time we hugged the Urguayan shore, then swung the blazing sun 
around behind us and struck out for what, but for its color, might 
have been the open sea. Soon we began to pass buoys of the Argen- 
tine government, marked " R. A. m. o. p.," with the kilometers to the 
end of my journey painted upon them. Toward eight, where the 
yellow sea and the bluish-gray sky met, the vast, perfect circle of the 
horizon was broken by a patch of faint white. It was only a tiny 
narrow line down at the extreme edge of the great inverted bowl of 
sky above us, yet so long — several inches, in fact — that should it 
turn out to be a city, as I began to suspect, since we were headed 
directly for it, it would be a large one indeed. Then the white patch 
began to take on faint individual shape, and above us the wireless was 
spitting its message to the yet invisible world ahead. An hour later 
we were in the midst of buoys, large and small, marking the " Canal 
Sur," or South Channel. Boats and steamers appeared, and sailing 
vessels spread their white wings across the yellow waters on all sides 
of us, while the city stretched along the horizon ahead had turned from 
white to gray, with a tint of red, neither color nor edifice conspicuous, 
except for two groups of huge brick smoke-stacks belching forth into 
the brilliant sky. Even after the long line of buildings had taken on 
definite form, and one could all but count their windows, the city 
seemed still to sit on the yellow sea. One was struck, too, by the 
narrowness of the strip ; the buildings seemed for the most part a bare 
four stories, with only here and there one as high as ten cutting into 
the landless sky-line. Two tugs took possession of us, dragging us up 
a narrow channel through a wilderness of shipping, where we must 
soon stop for lack of space, until we spied an unoccupied bit of wharf 
and warped gradually into it. It was a late-summer morning, the 
ninth of March. While the rest waited for their baggage to be ex- 
amined, an official glanced at my bundle, jerked a thumb scornfully 
over a shoulder, and I stepped out into the metropolitan rumble of — 
no wonder gringo residents have abbreviated it to " B.A." — " la 
Ciudad y Puerto de Santa Maria de los Buenos Aires." 

THE END 
6l2 



